ezEdit Log Editor

This topic contains historical information on changes, enhancements and corrections to ezEdit by version number and date. For the most recent changes and enhancements, see the What's New topic.

Version 2.7.3.730 - 04/26/2016

1.Enhancement. The log edit dialog now presents an error message if an attempt to load a log is made and the log file is locked by another application or otherwise cannot be opened by ezEdit.

2.Enhancement. ezEdit now detects Windows 10 and adjusts its display accordingly.

3.Fix. Corrected log validation error dialog typo.

Version 2.7.2.715 - 06/08/2015

1.Enhancement. Station configuration information can now be exported and imported in Preferences. Exported station information can be used by ezEdit, ezSuite and XStudio with minor adjustments after importing the information into one of of these applications.

2.Enhancement. Minor changes have been made to some dialogs to improve text readability in some operating systems, most notably Windows Server 2003.

3.Change. A new property, Force Time-stamp Update, has been added in the Miscellaneous Settings page of Preferences. When enabled, ezEdit will manually update a log file's time stamp after saving the log. Prior to this version of ezEdit, the default behavior was to always manually update the time stamp. Now, ezEdit will not manually update the time stamp as a default as this action will produce undesirable results if the target folder for the log is located on another PC running with different time zone settings. The manual time stamp update was originally implemented for users saving logs to a Novell Netware server that did not have long file name support enabled. If you are using ezEdit in such an environment, enable this property to return to ezEdit's original behavior.

4.Fix. When displaying the log selection dialog, the Scanning Files information panel would very occasionally get hidden behind the selection dialog as ezEdit was scanning for available files.

Version 2.7.1.710 - 10/24/2014

1.Enhancement. ezEdit now detects Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 operating systems and adjusts its display accordingly.

2.Fix. When opening or editing a log, an "invalid time encode" error could occur. This happened if the last hour of the day had more than 60 minutes worth of content and a directive was placed at or near the end of the hour. This scenario caused the estimated air play time to exceed 23:59:59, which raised the error. Now, ezEdit tests for this condition and adjusts accordingly.Version 2.7.0.705 - 02/12/2013

1.Enhancement. Log display times can now be shown as AM/PM times if desired. As a default, ezEdit continues to display log times in military format. To enable AM/PM time display, use the main menu item View | Show Log Time as AM/PM. When enabled, printed logs also reflect AM/PM times.

2.Enhancement. The ezEdit user interface has been updated to improve general appearance.

3.Enhancement. ezEdit now detects Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 operating systems and adjusts its display accordingly.

4.Fix. When a user attempted to register ezEdit by copying and pasting the registration key into the registration dialog, the registration key would be invalid because the user inadvertently copied leading spaces instead of just the registration key text. Now, any extraneous spaces are removed when the user pastes the registration key into the dialog. Additional feedback is provided when manually entering a registration key that is not the correct length, which can occur if a character is missed in typing or if copying only a portion of the registration key and pasting it.

5.Fix. When calculating an audio segment length, if the last segment on the log had no audio, the value (zero) was not displayed. This has been corrected.

6.Fix. Very occasionally, when ezEdit was creating a temporary file to store information for display, the temporary file was not correctly created and the information would not be displayed. The problem has been corrected.

Version 2.6.0.701 - 02/05/2010

1.Enhancement. ezEdit now reports the host operating system in more detail and has been updated to reflect the release of Windows 7.

2.Enhancement. Application icons for ezEdit have been updated.

3.Enhancement. ezEdit is now aware of multiple monitor host systems and properly saves and restores its position on the correct monitor.

4.Fix. A problem validating logs containing lower-case cart numbers has been corrected.

5.Fix. The pop-up menu associated with log editing no longer allows users to attempt to copy a spot record when the log is newly-created and has no valid records to copy.

Version 2.5.0.699 - 08/07/2009

1.Enhancement. This version of ezEdit introduces an all-new Preferences dialog. The preferences area has been completely redesigned, featuring a more logical organization of settings that is easier to use and understand. Some additional properties have been introduced, including control over application event logging detail and maximum size. See the Configuration section for more details.

2.Enhancement. A default station can now be assigned. When a default station is assigned, it is selected when a log, audit report or log reconcile window is initially displayed.

3.Enhancement. When importing cart categories (cart masks), the imported categories can now be optionally appended to the existing categories.

4.Enhancement. The Open Log dialog has been updated for better performance when working with a station with a large number of available files.

Version 2.4.6.697 - 03/23/2009

1.Enhancement. Inventory information is now automatically refreshed when a log's associated inventory file changes. This ensures the user is always working with the most current available inventory information. Previously, the inventory data was loaded when a log was opened and not updated until another log was opened.

2.Enhancement. Handling of malformed logs has been improved. Specifically, it has been observed that traffic logs produced by Wide Orbit occasionally contain invalid records, both under-sized and over-sized as a result of incorrect padding of the log record. If invalid log records cannot be handled, a message is displayed and the user can optionally view the log records that could not be processed.

3.Enhancement. The ezEdit main status bar has been updated with better-quality graphics and better visual appearance.

4.Fix. If a user minimized ezEdit and either rebooted the PC or logged out, the next time time ezEdit was launched, it would either show up on the task bar (minimized) or disappear altogether. In reality, the program was running, but the user could not see it.  Now, ezEdit will not restore itself to a minimized state on startup.

5.Fix. Additional checks are now made when loading an inventory data file to better deal with errors in opening or reading the data file.

6.Fix. When previewing a printed inventory report on-screen, context help would be inadvertently triggered if the user used [Right-Click] to reduce the size of the previewed information. Context help is now suppressed in the print preview displays.

7.Fix. ezEdit would not launch on operating systems older than Windows 2000. This included Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows NT4. The problem was introduced in version 2.4.5 and has been resolved.

Version 2.4.5.695 - 10/04/2008

1.Enhancement. A number of dialogs have been updated to be more visually consistent in the XP and Vista operating systems. Included are the registration, machine ID, password and about ezEdit dialogs.

2.Fix. If a user manually edited the ezEdit preferences file and changed a station number to a single-digit value or a value of more than 2 digits, ezEdit would not correctly find an audit file for a given station date. This scenario is now correctly handled, although manual entries of more than 2 digits are truncated to the first two characters.

3.Fix. When appending an item to a log and the last item on the log had a time of 23:59, ezEdit would allow an attempt to add a log record that requires a log time one minute later than the last item, creating an invalid log time of 24:00. Now, only items that can be appended to the log after 23:59 are allowed. These items are spot (cart) records and open avails.

4.Fix. If a user-defined log type was entered in dialogs that contain a log type, the manually-entered log type was not being limited to the 4-character maximum. Now, a user's manual entry is truncated to 4 characters if it is longer than is allowed.

5.Fix. A Play Cart Directive's product code and customer number information is now properly displayed on the log, if present in the log record.

6.Fix. If the host PC has more than 2GB RAM installed, the reported amount of available RAM was incorrect. On PC's running Windows 2000, XP and Vista, the correct amount of RAM is now displayed.

7.Fix. When previewing a printed report on-screen, context help would be inadvertently triggered if the user used [Right-Click] to reduce the size of the previewed information.  Context help is now suppressed in the print preview displays.

Version 2.4.4.691 - 07/03/2008

1.Enhancement. A keyboard shortcut to "Save Log As" has been implemented for log editing. [Shift-F10] displays the the save log dialog.

2.Fix. A situation where the database table containing stations did not get activated if there are no stations defined has been corrected. This prevented the end-user from adding stations in the preferences area.

Version 2.4.3.690 - 05/30/2008

1.Change. Version numbers of the "ez" series of products, including ezEdit, have been synchronized. These products share several pieces of core functionality and the version numbering change was made to reflect this.

2.Enhancement. When editing a cart (spot) record or a play cart directive record, each character of the cart number is now checked to be sure it is valid. This prevents entry of invalid cart numbers. Valid characters for a cart number include: A..Z, 0..9, {, }, !, #, %, ^, @, =, +.

3.Fix. When exporting a Log Validation report to file, the text had very narrow margins, resulting in a less-than-readable report. The exported report now formats properly when saved to file.

4.Fix. An eDatabaseError that could occur when installing and starting ezEdit for the very first time has been corrected.

5.Fix. A spelling error on the configuration password dialog has been corrected.

Version 2.4.2.688 - 07/09/2007

1.Enhancement. Changes have been made to the way ezEdit handles loading and saving preference information to improve performance. Improvement is particularly noticeable if ezEdit is launched from a network drive.

Version 2.4.1.686 - 07/02/2007

1.Change. Since log templates and XStudio emergency logs are considered "undated", date-checking of carts is no longer done when working with these types of logs. Missing carts, though, continue to be flagged if you have an inventory loaded and Cart Status Display is enabled.

2.Change. The exclamation point ( ! ) has been added to the list of acceptable cart mask characters. Although DCS and Maestro documentation indicate it is an invalid character to use when naming carts, it is not enforced.

Version 2.4.0.685 - 06/01/2007

1.Change. The ezEdit preferences file is now kept in the application directory (install folder). If you updated the software using the standard installer, the installation process should have been able to move the preferences file from the Windows folder, where it had been located in previous versions. If the move failed, you can still manually copy the preferences file to the application folder.

2.Change. The PC characteristics considered when registering ezEdit has been changed. If you updated the software using the standard installer, the installation process automatically updated your registration. On rare occasions, the automatic update could fail, particularly you updated from a very old version of ezEdit. If the automatic registration update failed, contact your vendor to obtain a new registration key. You will need to supply the original registration serial number and machine ID information to obtain your new registration.

3.Change. The help documentation has been updated to work with Windows Vista. Vista does not as a default support the traditional help file (*.HLP). The help documentation is now supplied as a compiled HTML file (*.CHM).

4.Enhancement. The ability to save a log using old-style 4-character log length data has been added. See the topic Log Options in Preferences. This option should be used only if you are working with another application that cannot handle the default 5-character (mmmss) log lengths.

5.Enhancement. In addition to the standard list of Commercial Types provided, you can now manually enter a commercial type code.

6.Enhancement. Log Templates can now be opened from the main dialog. Previously, users had to first open a log editing dialog before being able to open a log template.

Version 2.3.3.682 - 12/12/2006

1.Enhancement. Users can now import/export cart category information. The features are accessible via a pop-up menu on the cart category maintenance page in Preferences.

2.Enhancement. The application event log, where details of program operation are stored, is now automatically maintained so as not to grow beyond 1MB in size. Additional detail on user actions is now placed in the event log.

3.Enhancement. The dialog for creating and editing log Directives has been enhanced to add support for XStudio-specific directive keys "Hard Sync" and "Resume Automation".

4.Fix. If a user cleared the Description field when editing a log Directive and then selected a different directive type, a program AV would occur. This has been corrected.

5.Enhancement. Support for creating, editing, saving and inserting log templates has been added (*.FMT files). Users can now save any log as a template, edit the template and insert the template in a log or another template.

6.Enhancement. Support for creating, editing and saving XStudio emergency logs has been added.

Version 2.3.2.680 - 06/26/2006

1.Fix. When dragging a log item to a later time, auto-scroll would not work if the log's horizontal scroll bar was not visible. The inventory list area and the status bar now detect the log drag operation and enable auto-scroll.

Version 2.3.0.677 - 03/07/2006

1.Enhancement. Users can now set text and background colors for defined cart filters (cart categories). The Preferences | Cart Filters page has been re-designed to provide the means to assign text and background colors to each defined cart filter. The color combinations selected are applied to matching audio items on the log, providing a quick visual indicator of the items' category.

7.Enhancement. Users can now select a font style of their choosing for log text, along with the font size (in a range of 8 - 20 points) and whether or not the audio items will be displayed in bold text. Log font settings are located on the Preferences | Misc page.

Version 2.2.4.667 - 02/08/2006

1.Fix. An exception would occur if the last hour of the log - the 11:00 PM hour - had content that exceeded 1 hour and an element in the hour ended up with an estimated air-play time of 24:00:00 (midnight of the following day).

2.Fix. If a cart's length was edited, but nothing else changed, the hourly totals display was not being updated correctly.

3.Change. The visual appearance of certain controls in the application now conform to the Windows XP look.

Version 2.2.1.664 - 08/19/2005

1.Fix. A Change was made to correct a problem where the type code for a program title log item was being stored incorrectly.

Version 2.2.0.663 - 06/06/2005

1.Enhancement. An option has been added to display log times as estimated air play times. The estimated play time is hour-based, meaning that the first item in a given hour is estimated to play at the straight-up of the hour. This option is useful mainly for stations running local automation.

2.Enhancement. Log display column widths can now be modified by the user. The changed widths are restored at program startup.

3.Enhancement. Users can now hide the tool bar if desired. The tool bar state (visible or hidden) is saved and restored on program startup.

4.Enhancement. Event log display and search settings are now saved on exit and restored the next time the event log is viewed.

Version 2.1.7.662 - 04/04/2005

1.Enhancement. The directive edit dialog has been revised to support additional directive types, including suspend automation.

Version 2.1.6.661 - 02/14/2005

1.Fix. Handling of malformed logs, specifically invalid cart lengths in spot records, has been improved.

Version 2.1.5.660 - 12/08/2004

1.Enhancement. On-demand updating of log spot records, including Description and Length, has been added. Users can choose to update all audio records in a log - cart length only, description only or both cart length and description. This is particularly useful if a log was edited and saved with an editor that does not support the newer cart length style (mmm:ss). CMED versions prior to 2.4 do not support the extended 999 minute 59 second cart length field - earlier log editor versions supported only 99 minutes 59 seconds for a cart length. See the section in Troubleshooting that further describes the problem.

2.Enhancement. Users can now enable or disable extended text logging, using the Help | Debug Mode menu item.

3.Enhancement. When viewing a text file, users can now search the displayed text for any combination of information. Searches can be forward or backward from current location and can be case-sensitive, if desired.

4.Enhancement. Additional error logging has been added to better support end-users.

5.Enhancement. Commercial Type "Sponsor" (SPN) has been added to the list of available types when editing an audio element.

6.Fix. When a log validation dialog was closed, other remaining dialogs' status bars were not updated correctly.

Version 2.1.4.658 - 12/02/2003

1.Enhancement. Log validation has been revised to optionally include cart length-checking. Users can select a +/- range of zero (disabled) to 30 seconds in 5-second increments. The validation report will indicate those carts that have a length problem, i.e., a 60-second spot is ordered, but the inventory cart length is 30 seconds.

2.Enhancement. The log validation error display now includes the ability to do some additional data views, enhancing the drill-down capabilities of log validation. Users can now display date problems only, length problems only, missing carts only and grouped views of the data, including grouping by error and grouping by cart number.

Version 2.1.3.657 - 09/27/2003

1.Fix. Fixed a problem with inventory or validation reports not printing the last page of a report in some cases. The problem manifested itself mostly in Win9x OS', but could also show up in Windows NT v4.

Version 2.1.3.656 - 09/20/2003

1.Enhancement. Column widths of the data views in log validation are now saved and restored. If you change the width of a column in one of these dialogs, that width will be restored next time you use the dialog. Use the menu item "Help | Reset Display Defaults" to re-set the column widths to the defaults next time the program is started.

2.Enhancement. Print preview is now available for inventory reports in log editing and log validation reports. Where applicable, users can choose to preview all data in the report or just items that you have selected.

Version 2.1.2.655 - 05/05/2003

1.Fix. A change has been made to the saving of edited log files to ensure that the date/time stamp of the saved file is updated. A very few users reported that when using an NT Gateway to a NetWare server, the newly-saved log file's date/time stamp was not changed. The result was that the DCS or Maestro machine using the log did not recognize the log had been changed and did not refresh the log.

2.Fix. A minor change to process of loading a log has been made to ensure that a log saved by another application and somehow corrupted, will load properly. The problem seen by a few users was that the application saving the file would inadvertently not properly terminate a log record (item) and ezEdit would subsequently save the log, after editing, with this improper termination.

3.Enhancement. The About display has been updated to include more information about the PC on which ezEdit is running. Users can now save this information to a text file, if needed, for troubleshooting. The display will now appear more quickly, too, as the calculation of the host PC's CPU speed has been improved and takes less time to complete.

4.Fix. Changes have been made to the routine that attempts to "fix" log times when a log is loaded. This process tries to correct invalid log times - times that are out-of-sequence (i.e., a log note with a time of 10:13 appearing on the log AFTER another non-spot time with a time of 10:14). Logic has been improved to catch and correct more of these kinds of input log problems.

Version 2.1.1.653 - 03/07/2003

1.Enhancement. Changes have been made to the directive edit dialog to better identify the original directive when editing. The edit process now correctly adds or removes the characters '~' and '$' when changing directive types from or to time-approximate and cast-off directives.

2.Fix. When a user's registration expired by date, the application would close without allowing the opportunity to re-register. This has been corrected.

3.Enhancement. Additional log fix-up logic has been added to handle malformed logs that contain a colon (:) in the spot length field. If such spot records are found during the loading of a log, they will be corrected and the user is notified changes have been made.

Version 2.1.1.652 - 02/10/2003

1.Enhancement. Minor cosmetic changes have been made to some of the dialogs for readability.

2.Enhancement. Generating the machine ID for registration and copying the ID to the clipboard now includes the machine's name in the text copied to the clipboard. This was done to make identification of which ID is for which machine easier when registering more than one copy of the application.

Version 2.1.1.651 - 12/20/2002

1.Enhancement. Support for Maestro station numbers that do not conform to the published specification has been added. 2-digit station numbers like "13" (instead of the documented "SD") are now supported. You can now enter any 2-character combination in a station's Station Number field in Preferences.

2.Fix. Corrected a minor problem where not all of the user settings were being erased if the user elected to reset the display settings.

3.Fix. Corrected a problem where inventory display columns became unique to each log edit window opened. Now, the settings are global rather than per open window.

Version 2.1.0.650 - 12/02/2002

1.Enhancement. ezEdit now supports opening and editing multiple logs concurrently.

2.Enhancement. You can now validate logs without first opening the log. You can also validate multiple logs concurrently. The previous functionality of validating a log that is currently open has been retained.

3.Enhancement. The log validation display has been completely redone to be easier to read and work with. You can now sort validation data on any column in either ascending or descending order.

4.Enhancement. Validation reports can now be filtered. Cart Filters can be used to display only the carts you are interested in taking action on.

5.Enhancement. You can now choose to print only selected items when printing a validation report.

6.Enhancement. Validation reports are no longer fixed-font and are more visually appealing.

7.Enhancement. Copy and Paste of spot records can now span logs. You can Copy a spot from one log and Paste in another open log.

8.Change. Support for relay numbers 1-9999 has been implemented to match Maestro's upper limit of relay numbers that can be initiated from the log. This change impacts DCS users in that relay numbers beyond what DCS supports can now be entered. If you are editing a log for use with a DCS unit, make sure relay numbers for either Load Window or Execute Function dialogs are in the range 1-99. Previously, ezEdit restricted entries to this range, so DCS users were protected from inadvertently entering a number out of the range. With support for Maestro's limits, ezEdit now checks to be sure the entered number is in the range 1-9999 instead.

9.Change. Support for command-line loading of a log and/or inventory file has been removed. These actions are no longer applicable to the application, which now supports multiple log windows. See Appendix D - Command Line Switches for a list of currently-supported switches.

10.Fix. Previously, if a user selected a different user cart mask to filter the inventory list, the sort order of the list would be set to the default (cart number). Now, the sort order selected by the user is maintained when the cart mask is changed.

11.Fix. Double-clicking on a date in the Log Save As.. dialog now works (if enabled in Preferences).

Version 2.0.3.648

1.Enhancement. An option to enable double-click action in the log calendar dialog has been added. Enable the option on the Preferences | Misc page.

Version 2.0.2.647

1.Enhancement. Copy and Paste of spot record functionality has been added. You can now Copy a "C" (commercial or spot) record on the log to a special "spot clipboard", then paste it into the log, which inserts the copied spot record into the log at the selected log row position. This is ONLY for spots - no other records (non-spot records) will be copied or pasted. Access the functionality from the main menu Edit item or the log's pop-up menu or via shortcut keys. [Ctrl-F3] copies to the clipboard, [Ctrl-Ins] pastes from the clipboard. The "clipboard" is special and separate from the standard Windows clipboard.

2.Fix. The user could load a malformed log that has a structure like:
 
       00:01:59 Spot Record
       00:02:00 Spot Record
       00:02:01 Spot record
       00:02:02 Spot record
       00:02  Directive (or other non-spot record)
 
The log fix-up routine that runs as a log is loaded would not catch this. A common cause would be where a user had more than 59 spot records associated with a directive, followed by a directive (or other non-spot record) at the next minute. An unusual case, but was discovered when testing the paste from clipboard routines and pasted 80 records in the same location. It is now corrected.

3.Fix. Similar to above, on completion of a spot record insert, an update routine that updates spot times on the log for records, following an inserted spot, was not catching this same situation. It is now corrected and a log fix-up is run when encountered, thus showing the user the changes that had to be made to the log to accommodate the "rolling over a minute" effect of having more than 59 spot records within a single minute AND a non-spot record at the very next minute.

Version 2.0.1.645

1.Enhancement. Log search functionality has been added. You can now search for a cart number or a description. The search functionality is available from the main display Edit menu item, or you can use function keys. The [F11] key brings up the search dialog and allows you to select the type of search and enter search text. The [F12] repeats the last search that was executed, starting from the last successful search position in the log.

2.Fix. If an Execute Function log item had a relay number that included a space, the edit dialog would fail to open. An example would be a relay number of " 1" instead of the correct "01". This could occur when editing the function, not when creating one, as ezEdit properly pads single-digit values with a leading zero.

3.Fix. Relay numbers in log print or print preview were placed in the wrong column.

Version 2.0.0.644

1.Initial release of ezEdit.