Noise Wrangler

I'm working on my first external, and I'm facing a strange issue. My external compiles fine and behaves as I want. I save a patcher with the external in it, still no issue. 

But if I close and start Max again, and directly load the patcher with the external, then I get a "No such object" error. 

One way to clear the issue is to open a new empty patcher, create an object with the external (which is now visible and doesn't cause an error), close the empty patcher (without saving it), and only then edit the external object in the original patcher. 

I'm on Windows 10, Max 8.6.1, SDK 8.2 and the external is in C. 

Hello everyone,

I'm working on my first external, and I'm facing a strange issue. My external compiles fine and behaves as I want. I save...

external-no-such-object-issue

If your external works, but you get "no such object", this means Max isn't finding it. It needs to be in one of the directories that Max searches, such as your Library folder, or something you add to the filesearch path. Those paths are rather fragile, for example if you add a path, and then Max crashes, when you restart, the path is gone! When doing dev I always add my paths and then close Max successfully, and then proceed.

Thanks for chiming in. It is a bit more complicated that just not finding it. Max will find the external 

 if I first open a new patcher, create an object with the external, and then close the new patcher. Then and only then the external is visible when I load the existing patcher where the external is used.

If I start Max, and directly load the patcher where the external is used, then Max issues the "No such object" message. And the only way to see the patcher again is to do the same routine with the new patcher. Then I can go back to the original patcher and recreate the object without error. 

It seems like something isn't happening with the path when loading an existing patcher. (Or more likely something I'm not doing right). 

ok, but when you say "create an on object with the external", what precisely are you doing? If you are dragging your external into a patcher (ie from your system) that is different from creating a new object and typing the name of the external in a new obect box. I 

 (it's been a while since it happened to me) that the former will make Max find it. I could be misrembering... but I know I did experience weirdness similar to what you are describing at some point and it all came to paths and Max search folders.

Have you tried putting your compiled external into your Max 8/Externals folder? 

Documents->Max 8 ->Packages -> *create your folder* 

I think if you have not actually made a package, the correct directory is the Externals folder, not the packages folder. Packages require some extra files to make them visible to the package manager.

Thanks for your help guys. In answer to some of your questions:

The part that really confuses me is the fact that the 

 external isn't found only if it's already present in a patcher that's loaded just after starting Max. If it was always missing, I would know it was a problem with the code for sure. But in this case, I'm totally baffled.

Just as Iain said in his first reply, your 

is likely not correctly configured. When an object isn't in the search path, Max will try to infer it from a wider scope of folders (basically everything inside the Max/ folder) and add it to the search path, which works in 95% of all cases, but will lead to nastiness like the things you describe in the other 5%. I don't know exactly what happens at startup in your case, but I could imagine something like this:

Now, your search path is configured so that it contains the folder of 

, everything will all of a sudden work (and cause a great amount of confusion).

The simple answer to avoid all of this is to explicitly ensure that the path is set up correctly at launch. You're saying that they are in the same folder as the demo external from the max-sdk, but you're not telling us where this is. Is it either:

If the answer is "no" to both of these, it's not in your search path, and you should change this first and foremost

 folder as recommended in the Readme file. And I don't get any issues with the other packages and externals installed there.

I have thought about the possibility of something else called 

That second part is what really puzzles me here. It seems that if the 

 object is instantiated too quickly (like when loading an existing patcher), Max doesn't find it and then it gets 'confused'. 

 a few times, with different path configurations (with and without explicitly pointing to the 

 folder), and it hasn't changed anything.

Another option is to make a build script that cleans out previous versions and moves it to a known-good location after compiling. I wound up doing this for testing anyway. (Doesn't solve the why question but might solve your immediate issue!)

Thanks a lot Iain, it hadn't occurred to me! 

Putting the external in the same location as the patcher that calls it seems to solve the problem for now. 

External - No such object issue