I am new to Newforma and have a question about Project Administration. We are an egnineering firm that uses a mixture of Autocad and MicroStation. I have setup a custom activity that runs an external script file to load the appropriate MicroStation environment for each project. Currently our users have to click on this activity each time they open a project before they can use MicroStation. Is it possible to have this activity run automatically each time a new project is opened, or is there another way to have the script automatically run for each project?

Thanks.

Hi

Yes, there is an (undocumented) feature that we added for exactly your needs. It has been used successfully in at least one customer site. It requires some registry editing as follows:

Add the following registry string value:

RunOnProjectOpen

to the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Newforma\Fifth Edition

Set the value to the full path of the executable, command or batch file that you want to run. See the attached screenshot for an example.

When a project is opened in Newforma Project Center on your system, this executable will be run, and three arguments will be passed (each enclosed in quotation marks):

project name
project number
Newforma project file (.npr) path

You would need to set up the registry entry on each user’s machine that needs it. You can facilitate this by creating a .reg file with the special key and value.

Hope this helps,

Faan

Thanks Faan. That did the trick.

Brian

This feature looks very useful, and we are now planning to try and use it to solve a similar issue we are having.  We use a variety of AutoDesk products, including multiple versions of AutoCAD and ABS, and there are issues with some of these versions where files can become corrupt simply by opening them in the wrong program version (no “save” needed for the corruption to take place; simply opening the file is enough).

We are hoping to use this “execute on project open” function to be able to set the correct version of Autodesk software for each project.  If the correct version is not installed, we plan to point the DWG files to the Autodesk TrueView application as the external application choice for the .dwg file extension.