I’ve posted before that Netview uses the version of Internet Explorer installed on your system. It turns out that, as of IE8, it’s not quite that simple. Thanks to Luc-Eric for pointing this out.

Netview is a hosted version of the Internet Explorer WebControl, and by default, the WebControl displays pages in IE7 Standards mode.

To force Netview to use IE9 mode, you can either set a registry entry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (or HKEY_CURRENT_USER)
     SOFTWARE
          Microsoft
               Internet Explorer
                    Main
                         FeatureControl
                              FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION
                                   xsi.exe = (DWORD) 000090000

or add this meta tag to your HTML page:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9" > 

I tested the registry entry, and after I set it, this browser detect page correctly said I was using IE9 (before I set the registry, it said I was using IE7).

Also, after setting the registry entry, Netview scored 140 at http://html5test.com/ (before I set the registry, Netview scored 40). Note that IE9 itself scores 141.

By default, any network drive that times out is “marked as invalid” for 5 minutes (300 seconds), and you’ll see a message like this in the script log:

# INFO : 4000 - Server '\\server' is unreachable. Marked as invalid for the next 300 seconds

The timeout interval is controlled by the environment variable SI_FILEPATH_ACCESSRETRYDELAY.

Setting SI_FILEPATH_ACCESSRETRYDELAY to 0 will force Softimage to always try to access the files on the network drive. That might be useful if your network has extremely poor reliability.

From an XSI mailing list thread about this message, here’s a bit more info about how Softimage resolves paths:

XSI first checks the last path that an image has been found. This
might be offline drive X:. If a drive times out, we don’t try to
check that location for a while because otherwise it’d be really slow.
At this point, XSI resort to searching for the file from the user
path, using its search logic.
So that warning isn’t a problem – unless your “user path” was really
set to X:, in which case, go fix the path in the external file list.
The path where XSI finds the image is called the “resolved path”.

–Luc-Eric

A customer mentioned to me the other day that the PPG didn’t pop up when he created a null.

It turns out we never pop-up the PPG when you create a null. I just never noticed that.
To verify that, I checked the implementation of GetPrim, which is the script GetPrimProc in %XSI_HOME%\Application\DSScripts\primitives.vbs.

In GetPrimProc, you’ll see that we skip nulls when we call AutoInspect:

'--------------------------------------------------------------------
' Inspect the new object
'--------------------------------------------------------------------
if Not TypeName (out_primitive) = "Nothing" then
	if  Not out_primitive.type = "null" then
		AutoInspect GetPrimProc, ,, "General"
	end if
end if

The customer also had another problem: pressing ENTER didn’t open up the PPG either, or if it did, all he got was a numeric slider for setting the Icon. Restarting Softimage fixed this; my guess is that the cached PPG layout was corrupted somehow (Softimage caches PPG layout definitions–if you’ve spent any time coding custom properties you’ve probably noticed how the PPGs of existing properties don’t change when you change the layout code).