Older products failing to install with DIM
Taoz
Posts: 9,979
I've had several older products failing to install with DIM, they tested OK in WinRAR so I took a look at them. It appears that they all contain a "WebLinks" folder with som old DAZ promotion files which DIM apparently don't like, if you delete that folder they install fine. I've scanned all my zips and found 1229 files with the problem in the SKU range 3 to 6796, after that there don't seem to be any files with the problem.
weblinks_folder.png
648 x 336 - 44K
Post edited by Taoz on
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
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© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Yet another useless folder...
"Web Link", "WebLinks" and "Web Links" should not exist as folder and as categories in Daz Studio.
Reported to CS.
Bet they don't do anything about it.
If they're not going to go back and fix all the "lost and found" RDNA products, they certainly won't be bothered to fix all the older products that contain a weblinks folder.
Fixing them can be automated using a script, that's fairly easy. Otherwise they could probably just fix DIM so it can handle or ignore them, instead.
They should be able to do a batch process to remove the folder.
Hopefully they will fix all the corrupt archives at the same time too. I've had a ticket open on that for 3+ months.
Easy to fix, do not log into DS and do not use DAZ Connect (within DS), instead use DIM or Manual installation.
DIM and manual download is where the archives are corrupt. So there is no way to download correct files.
(I never use DAZ Connect. It fried my content database.)
Hopefully it's not because they don't have any good copies. I have about 90 bad ones myself.
I am hoping that my ticket has just been overlooked after the initial contact. I would like to use my products though.
I installed some older products in the last week or two with that Weblinks folder and didn't have any problems. Never met a DIM installation that didn't work unless the file really was corrupt. Another download took care of it, but it has been a long time since that happened. There is still the occasional zero-byte file that will fail an integrity test on an archive, but it will install properly nonetheless.
Bear in mind that if the ZIP is corrupt, DIM does not recognize the error. DIM proceeds as if the product installed correctly.
I discovered this when I installed a number of items and noticed assests were missing. I then checked the archive integrity and found they failed at between the 50 and 75% progress. Again, no error is written to the DIM log and nothing comes up stating there was in issue.
I then checked the rest of my product archive and found ~50 ZIPs were corrupt, both through the DIM download and the manual download. I opened a ticket early in June and got an we are investigating reply, but no further progress so far.
Most of the missing files tend to be texture files since they come late in the archive, but I have some geometry errors and some plug ins / applications that are corrupted too.
Strange. I've never encountered a missing file error that wasn't just a bad reference, or missing geometry, or any other assets that were suposed to be there, but then, I haven't tried everything yet. Could you PM me a list of products that you have problems with? I'm sure I'll have some, too, so I can do a deep dive on them to see what's what.
Sure.
Just tried to install PantPixie with DIM and it went off without a hitch. No issue whatsoever.
But it leaves one question: Why the heck does it contain a zipped copy of the product in the WebLinks folder?
All the ones I have in common have the zero-byte files, but didn't interfere with installation in DIM. You can take similar placeholder files (that do nothing) from another product to rename and replace the ones in the problematic products, or just add a space or '!' just to make it non-zero in size.
I had to delete the WebLinks folder from several zips yesterday because they all failed to install with DIM. I suspect it may be system related, like what Decimal Symbol (comma versus period) you use in Regional Setup which was a problem for Poser at some point. I noticed that one of the WebLink folders have a comma in the name: "DAZ Productions, Inc", I just tried to delete that comma in a zip that failed to install, after that it installed fine. We use comma as Decimal Symbol here, if your Regional setup uses a period instead it may not affect you.
As for the zero byte file thing, I was wondering about that yesterday when I checked one of the corrupted files, and noticed it contained several zero byte files. They were all base figure (A3, S3, V3) pz2 pose files while the non-zero byte files all were add on characters, so it looks like it's intended. Which makes it difficult to test zip integrity. Including the checksum (MD5 or whatever) for the whole zip in the accompanying .dsx file would make that a lot simpler.
What are those placeholder files there for at all?
They just allow the thumbnail graphic to show. They can have brief descriptors to delimit sets of files ("A3 ->", "V3 ->", etc), or some relevant directive ("Select Figure Before Applying Pose"). There are many that use a blank script that does nothing, instead of throwing an error if you actually try to run it.
OK. Well using blank scripts instead of zero byte files would fix that zip integrity problem then, I guess.
I guess I will update my open support request with this information and see if it can get resolved.
Aren’t those WebLinks old links to pages that don’t work anymore? In fact, when they worked anyway I deleted them because they didn’t contribute to anything.
They were for populating a Poser menu, so they didn't do anything for DS certainly.