2015-12-09 Meeting notes

Date

Dec 09 and Dec 11, 2015

Attendees

John Clyne, alan, scott

Notes

Alan completed error handling changes discussed last week and we reviewed the new GUI user notification popups.

• Error messages sent to popups should be truncated to a reasonable length
• GUI is not using return codes to detect error messages. Instead it is using callbacks on MyBase. This mechanism doesn't agree our error handling policy Error handling policy, and should be rectified. Alan pointed out that elements of the GUI may not be capable of returning error codes and may need to be treated differently. During the course of the conversation it emerged that GUI is not making use of the ConrolExecutive as expected. Further discussion is required.
• Error messages from renderers should be prefixed by the name of the renderer that generated them.

We had further discussion on how to handle recoverable errors within the GUI when the error may have occurred within a library and return an error code. Two options were suggested:

1. Augment the current success (e.g. 0) and fail (e.g -1) codes with a warning code.
2. Leave codes as is and add a "SetWarnMsg" method to the MyBase class.

Further discussion on the best choice is required. John pointed out that whatever method we choose to propagate the information back to the GUI we need to not make assumptions about how other applications (e.g. command line utilities, scripting interface) will want to make use of the error handling mechanisms provided. In particular, error reporting needs to be disabled (via MyBase::EnableErrMsg()) if a class method is able to recover from a "fatal" error. Otherwise, any error conditions will result in error callbacks or messages to stderr, etc.

WE also reviewed the GUI

• Scott doesn't like organization of tabs, and suggested moving to a "basic", and "advanced" style. We decided to table the discussion until after the GUI had more capability and could be better evaluated.
• A number of items for improvement were agreed upon and have been added to  3.x Development Action Items

Action Items