Comments on: Scary error dialogs http://thinkinging.com/2007/04/01/scary-error-dialogs/ an unfiltered stream of data flow consciousness Fri, 5 Sep 2008 20:18:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 By: Jim Kring http://thinkinging.com/2007/04/01/scary-error-dialogs/#comment-203 Jim Kring Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:19:05 +0000 http://thinkinging.com/2007/04/01/scary-error-dialogs/#comment-203 Aristos Queue: Thanks for the explanation and history. It's certainly nice to know that we're heading in the right direction. Here are a couple quick suggestions... First, I would filter out duplicate items -- you'll notice that there is a tremendous amount of duplication. Second, I would probably truncate the message, at some point, and then allow the user to open the log file to see more -- you'll notice that there are actually error messages that run off the bottom of the dialog and there is no way to see them. - Thanks Aristos Queue: Thanks for the explanation and history. It’s certainly nice to know that we’re heading in the right direction. Here are a couple quick suggestions… First, I would filter out duplicate items — you’ll notice that there is a tremendous amount of duplication. Second, I would probably truncate the message, at some point, and then allow the user to open the log file to see more — you’ll notice that there are actually error messages that run off the bottom of the dialog and there is no way to see them. - Thanks

]]> By: Aristos Queue http://thinkinging.com/2007/04/01/scary-error-dialogs/#comment-202 Aristos Queue Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:07:30 +0000 http://thinkinging.com/2007/04/01/scary-error-dialogs/#comment-202 This is actually the General Error Handler.vi composited. Prior to (some recent version of LV whose exact number I don't remember) you would get a GEH dialog for EACH ONE OF THESE with just an OK button. That behavior went back to the dawn of time. You couldn't break out, you couldn't stop it, they just kept coming. Terminator 2 in dialog form. One day, I couldn't take it any more and I taught the AppBuilder to aggregate all the messages into a single output. Is the output helpful? Well, that's a problem for each individual error code. There's not much this dialog could do to be more helpful since the output could be litterally any error that can be generated by LV or any module or even user VIs. It does seem that whoever added those error codes should've been more explicit about what was going wrong. There should be carriage returns between the messages. Don't know why those aren't there. If you've got a proposal for how to better display what is effectively a log file dump, file 'em with NI. This is basically a crash log -- one the user frequently can do something about and thus useful to display. This is actually the General Error Handler.vi composited.

Prior to (some recent version of LV whose exact number I don’t remember) you would get a GEH dialog for EACH ONE OF THESE with just an OK button. That behavior went back to the dawn of time. You couldn’t break out, you couldn’t stop it, they just kept coming. Terminator 2 in dialog form. One day, I couldn’t take it any more and I taught the AppBuilder to aggregate all the messages into a single output.

Is the output helpful? Well, that’s a problem for each individual error code. There’s not much this dialog could do to be more helpful since the output could be litterally any error that can be generated by LV or any module or even user VIs. It does seem that whoever added those error codes should’ve been more explicit about what was going wrong.

There should be carriage returns between the messages. Don’t know why those aren’t there.

If you’ve got a proposal for how to better display what is effectively a log file dump, file ‘em with NI. This is basically a crash log — one the user frequently can do something about and thus useful to display.

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