Once again – reverse eng. & following Bentley AutoPLANT menu items all the way through to SPECKEY.ini

I wrote this article, as I again had to figure this out from scratch and it is my 10th time doing so. I did pretty good this time – it usually takes longer. Anyways, if it helps anyone out there or me in the future – it was worth it.

In AutoPLANT / AutoCAD,

• Place a component.
• Press the up arrow to see what command that was (A) AT_INSTRIND
• Click on Tools->Customize User Interface. Look under partial Customization files and note locations. I think we need the at_elect.cuix file (this is a binary file). It, in our case is here c:\programdata\bentley\plant v8i\elect\. Here you will see a .mnl file with the same name. Open it and search to see what (A) really does. Record this as (B) at_Component_insert “at_instr” “AT_INSTRIND”)
  • this 2nd part is the class that will be referenced (C)
• Now look at the path along which the class.ini files will be searched… (see my previous article)
  • in our case it was IN The project under the Instruments path <PROJECT>\Config\modules\Instrmnt and there was a class with a whole bunch of classes that are defined elsewhere – only put stuff in the project that is different from the default class.ini items. It will find them along that search path listed above.
  • Sure enough – there is the issue. Looking in class.ini for (C) we confirmed we are looking for [AT_INSTRIND] which is the same for SPEC_KEY=AT_INSTRIND – so we are looking for  in SPECKEY.INI. Here we see the class.ini and speckey.ini files were added and changed from a while ago and it refers to the wrong verified with Beyond Compare (another fabulous piece of software).
  • Root cause? The menu item refers to the wrong class
  • Now comes the long way for others to correct it.