Missing item icons suddenly showing up in Smart Content

paulawp (marahzen)

Sorry in advance for the long writeup!

I recently upgraded to a new hard drive, but I'm not sure if this problem is related. The background of the move is that I have Daz installed on the D drive. I had the computer shop copy the contents of the old D to a new larger drive, which is my new D drive and the old D drive is now the E drive. The new D drive eventually will only contain Daz store content while the E drive (formerly the D drive) will only contain saved files, assorted non-Daz content, etc. Eventually I'll clean up each drive - removing the Daz installed content on the newly named E drive and the saved files, etc on the new D drive - but for now I've renamed the root folders with "Defunct-" to prevent accidental usage of stuff on the wrong drives, while retaining the contents just in case. This work was done last week and I have been using Daz with minimal trouble for days since. However, I've suddenly noticed in Smart Content a lot of "!"-with-triangle icons for products that I specifically remember had normal picture icons in the past. Most of my Daz store items are not affected, but enough are that it's visually annoying - plus I actually am used to recognizing the product by its icon picture. The "!" icon items do, however, work with no observed probems.

Also going on is the perpetual nag: "Configuration of system has changed. To use content installed using DAZ Connect, the content owner must re-authenticate" on starting Daz. I have no plans to do this, as I never use Daz Connect intentionally and have not done so accidentally in months. I've certainly not logged in since the drive upgrade last week, which is when I first noticed this problem.

The first thing I tried was uninstalling/reinstalling an affected item in DIM, which changed nothing. (I usually install with Daz Central but use DIM for special-use, problem scenarios.)

On closer inspection of the metadata, I find that the problem is always some tiny change of the file name - an extra underline, or "males" instead of "male(s)" or some other minor difference like that. I can readily fix it if I take the name of the dsx file seen in Content DB Editor and update the files in runtime/support.

The first thing I thought - since I actually do software support - is that something happened to the file name while transferring from one drive to another. But the fact that the differences do vary caused me to question that initial assumption, and when I looked at the still-existing files on the E drive, they have the "bad" name also. The files were copied correctly with the names they had prior to the new drive. Yet surely, I would have noticed all these missing icons when using Daz last week.

So two questions:

1) Any ideas on why this suddenly cropped up, apparently in conjunction with copying the files from one drive to another (even though the file names are the same in both locations)?

2) Is there anything else I need to do, or be aware of or alert to, other than rename the .dsa, dsx and .jpg files in runtime/support to what Content DB Editor seems to think they should be named? One thing that catches my eye is that all of these affected items have nothing in the Files and (usually) Scene IDs sections while similar unaffected items appear to. But - as noted - I have yet to have any actual problems using the affected items. They apply, work as expected, render, save, open, with no apparent issues.

ETA this example

Note how the file with today's date/timestamp has what Content  DB Editor seems to think the correct name is - the difference is the comma, which I've pointed out with the red arrow. It appears that just opening to look at it creates this new .dsx file with the correct name. The files from 12/16/2022 - when I installed my existing content on this computer when it was built last December - have the old name. If I update them, the picture icon appears again instead of the "!" icon. Note here that Files is empty, but in this example, Scene IDs was actually populated.

Richard Haseltine

The jpg and the file above it don't have cammas, the other two (including the oen you highlight) do. That would make the names not match, but i don't know how they would come to differ.

paulawp (marahzen)

Richard Haseltine said:

The jpg and the file above it don't have cammas, the other two (including the oen you highlight) do. That would make the names not match, but i don't know how they would come to differ.

Right. The original files (from December 2022) don't have that comma. I can't vouch for every affected item, but there have been items affected by this problem that I know showed a normal picture icon within recent weeks - ie, some that I use often. 

Since the file name is the same on what was the working D drive prior to last week, that suggests to me that the data in the Content DB somehow changed around the time of the drive swap.