By hatts
#365051
Is there a way to suppress the geometry error dialog at export time? The window pops up and pauses the export process. At the very least, it would be helpful if for future versions, errors were grouped into one dialog, instead of popping up once for every error.

I'm not looking for a faster export; I'm looking for an export that doesn't stop in its tracks to inform me of errors. Sometimes I start FIRE and click to another window to let it voxelize and when I check back a few minutes later, no progress has been made because the error dialog is waiting for my input.
By JDHill
#365052
The only way to suppress the dialog is to fix the geometry. You can indeed tell the plugin to collapse notification of multiple failures into a single dialog at the end of the process, by disabling the Stop on First Error option in Output > Export. I don't recommend doing that though, because this only enables you to waste lots of CPU cycles processing multiple flawed parts.

That's why by default, you are notified upon the first failure. It is not considered an option for the plugin to provide you with a method by which you could completely ignore these -- they are critical errors, which would have crashed SolidWorks, had they not been very purposefully caught and reported by the plugin. Technically, they usually indicate a situation in which SolidWorks has failed to produce a mesh for an entity; here, even the plugin's act of asking about the mesh would produce a crash. Maxwell aside, fixing the geometry, and thereby eliminating these notifications, is in your interest, just in terms of maintaining data integrity and general SolidWorks stability.

Understand that if you are presented with this dialog and decide to click through and continue, the plugin explicitly provides you with no guarantee regarding the result. In the case of writing an MXS, this means we can't guarantee that the MXS will be valid; in the case of Fire, it means we can't guarantee the stability of the remainder of your SolidWorks session. In many cases, neither of these will materialize -- the point is that we don't know, and so can make no guarantee.

One programming philosophy would argue that the plugin should not catch such errors at all, and that rather, they should be allowed to crash your session immediately, to create an urgency to fix the problem at its source. I do not think that particularly advisable here, though, as you would have little idea what had gone wrong, and since it would take a lot of trial-and-error work to fix the model, in the case of multiple errors. The point of mentioning this is to underline that the appearance of this dialog seriously means that you should fix your model, because it is not, strictly speaking, exportable. The intended use is that you would leave Stop on First Error enabled, and fix the model until the notification is no longer necessary.

I realize that's quite a bit to write in response to this seemingly-simple question; hopefully it explains, though, why the topic is a bit deeper than it might appear to be.
By hatts
#365056
That's actually a tremendously interesting response, thank you (as always) for taking the time. As a non-programmer I had no idea of the connection between throwing errors and preventing crashes, so this was enlightening.

Thanks again
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