Undocked INFO Window is Hidden

cburgess

Hi All,
Not a very deep technical question–and it may end up being more of a Windows question than Solibri–but I’m at a loss with this.

I undocked my INFO window in the COMMUNICATION screen sometime about a week ago, and I just noticed that it’s not visible anywhere when I’m on the COMMUNICATION screen. Clicking on the VIEWS list at the top right shows it grayed out, which means it’s already open somewhere. On the other tabs (MODEL, for instance) when the INFO window has been closed, it opens again in the middle of the screen when an object is selected. That doesn’t happen in my COMMUNICATION screen, which is another indication that it’s already open somewhere.

I use a laptop (that is usually closed) connected to two external monitors, but I sometimes unplug the monitors to take my laptop into meetings. This can do funny things to open windows sometimes but I haven’t ever had the Solibri windows undocked when I unplugged the monitors. The Windows 10 tricks for moving a program that is off screen (SHIFT+R. CLICK on the taskbar icon and select move) only moves the main Solibri window. Similarly, using ALT+TAB to cycle through open windows only shows the main Solibri window. I tried undocking one of the windows from the MODEL screen to see if it showed separately when using ALT+TAB, but only the main Solibri window shows, not the undocked window. I tried changing my screen magnification, which can hide things sometimes, but again the missing INFO window did not appear.

I have restarted my computer once to try to fix this, but it did not fix it. If anyone has a suggestion I would welcome it.

cburgess

So I found my INFO window again, but in an unexpected way. As I said in the original post, I had undocked the INFO window to move it to another screen so I could enlarge the 3D window a little. What I forgot is that I did that while at home, where I use my laptop’s screen and one large external monitor (at work, as my original post describes, I use two large external monitors with the laptop closed).

When I got home this evening and hooked up my one external monitor to my open laptop, there it was, in the same place I put it last week. What I find strange is that the undocked windows did not relocate themselves to a visible part of the screen when the computer changed screen configurations, even after the computer was restarted.

Maybe this will help someone in the future–it was certainly an unexpected find for me. And for once I’m (slightly) glad I had to work from home!

Matti

The undocked views remember the location. With temporal use of external screens it may happen that the view are lost (opened in the location that is not visible).

There are following workarounds:

Change to the layout where an undocked view is lost. Move the undocked view visible using keys Windows + Arrows Left or Right.
File->Settings->Layout: Save your working layout and restore layout
Remove layout file in C:\Users<username>\Solibri\SOLIBRI\Settings and restart Solibri
Edit layout file with text editor in C:\Users<username>\Solibri\SOLIBRI\Settings and restart Solibri (You can remove the lost view)

cburgess

Matti, thanks for those workarounds. I ran into the issue again when I opened Solibri on my home office monitor and couldn’t see a couple of my windows that I had undocked. I restored my layouts, but strangely, in the Communication layout, when I tried to open the Model Tree it still opened outside the visible area. Windows doesn’t recognize the undocked items as separate windows, so using the Windows + Arrows only moves the main Solibri window.

What I ended up doing was to make a new layout specifically for my home office that has all my undocked things oriented to the monitors I have at home. So I’ll have an “Office” set of layouts and a “home” set of layouts since my monitor setups are different.

Mario

@Matti We also have customers who repeatedly have this problem and it is very, very tedious and time-consuming to resolve. It should be possible for Solibri to recognize how large the entire screen area is and then move the undocked window to a visible area. In all my experience, I have never seen software that has such a problem. Please fix this problem finally, we would be very grateful for it…

Ricardo

I agree with Mario. In our office we have flexible workplaces, so this problems happens often. One trick that can help sometimes is to disconnect any external monitors and just use your laptop screen to reposition the window.