[4.7.0] Profiles missing and cannot be created

[kelaymon]

Application version
4.7.0

Platform
Windows 10

Printer
Ender 3 Pro

Reproduction steps
Opened Cura and checked for profiles. My default 0.2 mm profile settings are there but when I click on "Update profile with current settings", it appears to not create a profile.

Screenshot(s)

Actual results
"Manage profiles" shows no entries either for previously created profiles in 4.6.2 or for the newly updated settings.

Expected results
Profiles should be there

Project file

Log file
(See https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura#logging-issues to find the log file to upload, or copy a relevant snippet from it.)
cura.log

Additional information
Upgraded from 4.6.2

[kelaymon]

After restarting the program several times, now my profiles are showing up. Nothing additional was done.

[nallath]

Do you perhaps have a custom material active? Cura 4.6.0 used to have a bug where the wrong user profiles would be visible. Since that has been fixed in 4.7.0, that might be what you're seeing.

[kelaymon]

Yes, I have 4 materials created due to slight differences in print temps and diameters. One of those was active when all this happened, but it's still active and has not been changed. I restarted Cura about 6 times during all this and it finally started displaying profiles. In the image below, the items dotted red were all missing. The blue dotted item was there but would not appear in the profiles list in the settings.

[nallath]

I don't see a whole lot in the logs. Could you share your 4.6.2 configuration folder?

[jjtk88]

FWIW, I have this problem as well. I just upgraded from 4.6.1 -> 4.7.0. I have a number of custom profile and materials created. When selected, all of my profiles disappear and am unable to select any old profiles. The Profile selection drop down just says "Not Supported"

[kelaymon]

What is the typical path to the folder you need? I have a 4.6 folder under %appdata%\cura but when I try to zip it up to send it, it's 26 MB.

[jjtk88]

Wanted to add one more comment.

The material I had loaded when I initially launched Cura 4.7 seems to still be there, and Cura auto-selects "Standard Quality" by default. However when I select any other Material from the dropdown, the profile menu options disappear.

[kelaymon]

So I just discovered I have a similar issue to jjtk88. I have 4 custom materials. When I select 2 of them, it appears that my profiles are working including the defaults. When I select 2 other ones, I get the "Not supported" message as well and no profiles are shown, not even the built in defaults.

[nallath]

That's probably because those materials have a different type. So if you changed your custom PLA to be of type PLA+, it doesn't have built in default ones. It was actually a bug in previous cura versions that it was showing them.

If you can send me the config folder (either by stripping out the plugins or just uploading it somewhere), I can verify if this is the case or not.

[jjtk88]

@nallath ah, I see that now. I changed my "PLA2" override -> "PLA" and it seems to all work now.

Is it not possible to specify material types other than the "common" ones?

[kelaymon]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1naxC-B_bht6KmETrS47-gWeHoLwcMFK_/view?usp=sharing

I modified the Material Type field from "PLA+" to "PLA" and that seems to have resolved it.

[nallath]

How it should work:

1. Select Generic PLA
2. Open profile dropdown window; notice a number of profiles (Super, dynamic, standard, low, & custom profiles).
3. Create a new material
4. Change type of the material to "FOO"
5. Material selection becomes yellow (since there isn't a quality profile for a material of type "FOO"
6. Only profiles created on this not-supported state should be visible.

It is possible to create new types, but we also need to know what qualities are actually supported by that material. For a slew of materials we have some pretty sane defaults. But it uses the type to figure out with what it needs to match.

So it's perfectly okay to make "My custom PLA", as long as its type is PLA (so that Cura knows what material category it is!). If it doesn't find it, well, it just goes in this "warning" state (telling you: Hey, you can play around with settings, but the defaults for this might not be good).

[jjtk88]

I never would've thought that was the reason why the material showed up as yellow! I always noticed that a handful of my profiles showed up as yellow, but after poking through the "Print Setting" menu I could never find any setting that appeared to cause the material to be yellow. I (erroneously) figured that the "Material Type" input box was there for tagging/organization purposes. This solves a mystery for me!

As an aside, would a drop down menu be more appropriate under "Material Type" to make it more obvious?

[kelaymon]

No problem. Not having the "+" on the end of it is not the end of the world. I can just put it in the Display Name field. The only reason I put it in there to begin with is Inland has PLA and PLA+.

I agree with jjtk88 that a drop down for material type would be nice if it's going to be a field that is expecting a certain input.

[nallath]

I (erroneously) figured that the "Material Type" input box was there for tagging/organization purposes. This solves a mystery for me!

That's what the label is for. But yeah, we probably should think about how to fix this.

I agree with jjtk88 that a drop down for material type would be nice if it's going to be a field that is expecting a certain input.

We've been debating solutions for this for quite some time now. I don't think anyone came up with the dropdown. I sure as hell feel a bit stupid for not coming up with it.

[RaabenF]

How it should work:

1. Select Generic PLA
2. Open profile dropdown window; notice a number of profiles (Super, dynamic, standard, low, & custom profiles).
3. Create a new material
4. Change type of the material to "FOO"
5. Material selection becomes yellow (since there isn't a quality profile for a material of type "FOO"
6. Only profiles created on this not-supported state should be visible.

It is possible to create new types, but we also need to know what qualities are actually supported by that material. For a slew of materials we have some pretty sane defaults. But it uses the type to figure out with what it needs to match.

So it's perfectly okay to make "My custom PLA", as long as its type is PLA (so that Cura knows what material category it is!). If it doesn't find it, well, it just goes in this "warning" state (telling you: Hey, you can play around with settings, but the defaults for this might not be good).

I still dont get it :(

is this the only workaround? im going back to 4.6.2

[nallath]

It's not a workaround. The situation in 4.6.2 is flat out wrong. You will not get the correct settings (or settings that depend on what configuration you had previously active).

[RaabenF]

thanks @nallath
i see, but it worked. so there's actually no way migrating the old profiles? i had custom materials created, that shoud mach my print profiles, but still only the PLA based ones are visible.

BTW didnt even know that cura is opensource, is it? can one contribute, i dont see stuff in the wiki about that
thanks for the response anyway. cluddering configurationthings hmm... thats how it is

[Ghostkeeper]

BTW didnt even know that cura is opensource, is it? can one contribute, i dont see stuff in the wiki about that
thanks for the response anyway. cluddering configurationthings hmm... thats how it is

Cura is open source (because you can see its source code) and free (as in "freedom", because you can contribute). Although free software is not black-and-white, we do our best to incorporate contributions through bug reports, feature requests and pull requests, and Cura's license allows you to make modifications and publish them, which makes Cura "free software". That doesn't mean that it's easy to make code changes though. Cura is still a very big system, with a complex structure, especially the profile system.

i see, but it worked. so there's actually no way migrating the old profiles? i had custom materials created, that shoud mach my print profiles, but still only the PLA based ones are visible.

The easy workaround is to change the material type to something that has supported quality profiles.

Cura can't migrate these profiles automatically because it's missing information. In particular, these profiles don't have the information as to which built-in quality profile they were based upon. In Cura 4.6, we were not filtering custom profiles correctly, which made custom profiles appear regardless of what built-in profile they were based on. So even though a profile was based on the "draft" profile, it would appear in the list of profiles even if you're using a small nozzle size and there is no "draft" profile for that nozzle size. It would select an arbitrary profile then to base it on, which causes the print to be completely different.
Now in 4.7, this filtering is fixed. The profile no longer appears in the list if it's based on a quality level that's not available. But if you were using the profile in that incomplete state it causes a workflow issue. The profile still stores that it's based on the "draft" profile, so it won't appear in the list if there is no built-in "draft" profile.

You could repair the old profiles manually in your configuration folder, which would cause the profile to finally become stable, actively marking it as being based on an empty quality profile. This involves making changes to the configuration folder though, so it's easy to make mistakes and you should make a back-up first.
What you would need to do is to go to Help -> Show configuration folder and close down Cura. Then search for the quality_changes subfolder and in there find all files that have a name similar to the profile you want to edit. There should be one file for each extruder that your printer has, and one extra file for the global settings. In each of these files, under the [metadata] tag, search for the quality_type line and change its value into not_supported. Save the files, then start up Cura. They will no longer be available for printer configurations that have supported quality levels, but they will then be available for those that don't.

[bodyboarder2528]

We'll need the profiles that you want to add (.inst.cfg files). You can look at the existing profiles for examples. Preferably those profiles are added via a pull request.

Adding profiles for eSun's PLA+ would, I think, solve the immediate problem reported. It doesn't really fix the underlying issue of the user experience of what the Material Type means. We have an issue for that in our backlog (CURA-7670). That ticket is to add a drop-down combobox to select the material type from, instead of a plain text field. This would serve to educate (solution 1 above) and in the long run to canonicalise the material types (solution 3).

that should suffice. when will this be added?

[Ghostkeeper]

that should suffice. when will this be added?

If you're talking about the drop-down for material type, it's currently about halfway down our priority list, with over a hundred issues ahead of it. We can't expect this for release 5.0 or 5.1 and it's hard to give an ETA.

If you're talking about eSun's profiles, we are not going to implement this ourselves since we don't have a printer at Ultimaker that supports eSun's PLA+, and creating profiles for Ultimaker's printers is not going to add them for other printers anyway. For this we'd need community contributions from people that have those printers that you're having problems with.

[printingotb]

If it is as you say, the missing intent_category seems like a bug in the version upgrader to me, for the upgrade to the version when your printer first had intent profiles. Which printer is that, and when did it get intent profiles? In the version upgrade to that version, it should've added the intent_category listing. This is likely something that we've overlooked since it doesn't happen very often that an existing printer gets intent profiles, and while we test third party printers quite thoroughly once we change something, the version upgrade of existing custom profiles might be something we've missed.

It is a different issue though. The default intent category can always be added so there is always enough information in Cura to restore the profile.

Cura 4.13.1 imported all my 4.3 profiles with no issues 😃 Did you make any changes to this?

[Ghostkeeper]

Hmm, not as far as I know. The only backward upgrade fixes I could find quickly (looking through the history of the version upgrades) were a fix for storing the log-in key when it's on the keyring, and a fix for the active printer not being upgraded. Both of those are in the preferences file and not relevant for importing profiles. I didn't look all the way back to 4.3 though.

[naasking]

I just ran into this issue as well. If I switch to "Generic ASA" all profiles disappear. If I switch to ABS the standard profiles appear.

I also tried importing material profiles from the marketplace and that didn't work either, they don't show up under materials even though it says they were successfully added to Cura.

[jonn-smith]

I'm experiencing this issue as well with 5.0.0. Using a Creality Ender-3, I select eSun PLA+ from the materials drop-down menu and I see the No profiles matching configuration of this extruder error. Sure enough, when I go into the profiles menu, all profiles for the Ender-3 are gone. When I switch it back to generic PLA the profiles are back and I can print as normal.

[nallath]

I'm experiencing this issue as well with 5.0.0.

That makes sense, as we haven't changed the behavior (yet)

[jonn-smith]

👍

[ElJefeDSecurIT]

I think I can repro this or something similar: just stumbled across it when adding a new filament:

I forgot a space character in MATERIAL TYPE:

removed the space and profiles came back.

[mcmara]

So, what is the correct way to print generic ASA with my Voron 2.4? If I select "Generic ASA" in materials and activate it all goes away (profile not supported). According to this logic, my Voron can only print ABS, PLA and PETG. Everything else gives profile not supported. Is this by design?

Edit 1: if i select my old Folgertech FT5 printer, then ASA is supported and I can select it (unlike the Voron printer). Tried also to create a brand new second Voron printer and, yet again, ASA is not supported with that printer. So, it seems like the Voron 2.4 printer profile is coded to support only PLA, ABS and PETG. This is of course very odd. Is there any "machine setting" I can change to allow more materials?

Edit 2:
Maybe an ASA config should be added here?
https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/tree/main/resources/quality/voron2

[Stuntman380]

Any updates for this? Surely if material types were a dropdown selection, this would stop causing compatibility issues.
Why make material type a text field when any custom material type name won't work?

[GregValiant]

I'm cleaning house.
Is this still an issue in current Cura versions (5.8.0 and up)? Can this be closed?

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically closed because there has been no response to our request for more information from the original author. With only the information that is currently in the issue, we don't have enough information to take action. Please reach out if you have or find the answers we need so that we can investigate further.