How to disable Customer Error Reporting (CER) dialog?

[Anonymous]

I am currently writing a COM application that uses the Inventor 2013 APIs to open up and inspect CAD files. This utility is intented to operate on large amounts of Inventor data. I am using SilentOperation and Visibile properties to allow the automated process to run unmanned (i.e., suppressing any popups). However, there are occasions where Inventor will crash due to some corrupt data or some other system problem, which results in the CER dialog popping up.

The utility handles Inventor crashes by clearing out and restarting the session, but the CER dialog prevents this from happening until a user manually closes the window. I would like to avoid the complications of creating a monitor' that handles killing the Inventor.exe process in the event of a crash. Is there any setting - either in the application configuration or through the APIs - that would turn off the CER when Inventor crashes? I have seen solutions that disable CER for AutoCAD (http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-2010/Customer-Error-Reporting-CER/m-p/3468502#M33535), but I need to be able to do this in Inventor.

Any help would be much appreciated!

[Anonymous]

I haven't tested this but you might try looking at these registry settings

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\Inventor\RegistryVersion16.0\WS:409\CadManagerControl\CustomerErrorReport

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the suggestion, Farren.

Unfortunately, the only values in that CustomerErrorReport section of the registry are "EnableRoundtrip" (which was set to 1) and EnableSendPCName (which was set to 0).

I tried flipping "EnableRoundTrip" to 0, but that didn't stop the popup.

I have found that the popup was actually not preventing the application from restarting (*shakes fist at QA*), so the severity of this "issue" has gone down drastically. Now it is just more of a nuisance, as I'm left with about 14 CER popups after the read, but it's far from a blocking issue.

I would still be interested in finding a way to disable the CER popup, though, if only for personal curiosity.

[psaarloos]

Hi,

You could start a backgroundworker at the moment you launch Inventor. In the backgroundworker you'll need to watch the running processes. If you find a process named senddmp.exe you'll need to kill it.

Hope this helps you!

Regards,
Pim Saarloos

[dbrblg]

Has anyone found a way to disable this via Inventor without using third party tools?

This is an extremely annoying 'feature' which it appears you cannot disable 

[adam.nagy]

Hi,

There is no supported way of disabling it, but you could of course rename the senddmp.exe to something else or even replace it with your own executable that would get called when Inventor crashes.

However, this way the users would not be able to report any of the issues to our logging systems, so we would be unaware of the issues they run into. 

Cheers,

[Tobias_96]

Hi,

I am wondering if there is a supported/easy way of preventing this dialog to pop up in the latest adsk versions?

All the best

[adam.nagy]

This is the info I got.

We provide a configuration EnableCER to disable the CER component:

**Win**
- Registry key path: 
    - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\CER 
 - Registry value: 
    - EnableCER 
    - REG_DWORD, integer flag, default is 1

**Mac**
 - Config file path:
      - /Library/Application Support/Autodesk/CER/preference.xml
 - Key 
      - com.Autodesk.CER.EnableCER
      
**Linux**
 - Config file path:
      - /var/lib/Autodesk/CER/preference.xml
- Key 
      - com.Autodesk.CER.EnableCER

User can also configure to send the CER report automatically without showing the CER dialog.
The way to do it is using the "options file", following steps:

1. Create an options file in local file system with content like: /AUTOSEND _email_
   1. NOTE: please replace the placeholder _email_ with a real email
2. Set the options file path to a new REG_SZ type registry value named OptionsFile in key path:
   1. For all users in the system: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\CER
   2. For current user: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\SendMiniDmp\Settings

The attached autosend.opt is an example of options file.
The registry_options_file_global.reg and registry_options_file_current_user.reg are examples of registry settings. (NOTE: please replace the autosend.opt path to real value)

And this configure can be used for both CER v6 and v7.

See files in the attached zip

[Tobias_96]

Thanks for the solution!

Now our automation server is not covered by CER windows in case of errors 😎