error trying to open Fusion comp "unexpected symbol" etc.

the screengrab of the error message kind of says it all... Fusion won't open the comp and so I cannot proceed. I had created the comp on the same machine and same version of Fusion (9.02) yesterday and I'm really hoping to be able to avoid losing and having to try to recreate the work I did therein. The full message says;

[string "Composition"]:540: unexpected symbol near '='

searching online I found a couple mentions of the error but not in the context of Fusion ; https://codea.io/talk/discussion/88/une ... near-fixed

Anyone have any ideas about the source of this problem ? Looking at the comp in a text editor the word "Composition" appears only once at the very beginning and of course there are lots and lots of = ... Any suggestion how to go about trying to directly modify a copy in the text editor to try to "fix" it ? I'm thinking 540 refers to an error code rather than pointing to a line number ? Any help with this unfortunate occurrence is much appreciated

Screen Shot 2018-04-26 at 11.40.30 AM.png (50.54 KiB) Viewed 902 times

FYI I solved this by using a text editor (Text Wrangler) to edit a copy of the file. I deleted some of the code from the end of the file, saved, and then tried opening in Fusion again. If I got the same error I figured I hadn't hit the problem part yet, but if I got an "eof" error (end of file reached) then I figured I had deleted the part causing the problem - and this way I was able to quickly isolate the problem entry and delete it (only that part) and then my comp opened.

I now believe the entry causing the problem was made when I was adding controls to a tool and I had inadvertently created an extra control and tried to delete it (not realizing it's not possible to delete a control through the Fusion UI once you've created it) and I had somehow deleted the ID of the control (it was left blank). And it saved the comp OK, but gave the error upon trying to reopen the comp... So for example a "normal" control I had added appeared something like this in the text editor ;

Code: Select all

UserControls = ordered() {
            width_multiplier = {
               LINKS_Name = "width_multiplier",
               LINKID_DataType = "Number",
               INPID_InputControl = "SliderControl",
               INP_Default = 1,
               INP_Integer = false,
               INP_MinScale = 0,
               INP_MaxScale = 1,
               INP_MinAllowed = 0,
               INP_MaxAllowed = 1,
               ICS_ControlPage = "Color",
               INP_External = false
            },

but the problem entry appeared with nothing to the left of the = before the curly brace - like this ;

Code: Select all

             = {
               LINKS_Name = "",
               LINKID_DataType = "Number",
               INP_Integer = false,
            },

Deleting that entry by text editor made the comp openable by Fusion again. Perhaps just typing some kind of name there would have worked too. I'm providing this info in case future explorers wander into this dark corner and search for a solution.