Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Simon Rose via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Thu, 4 Feb 2021 16:18:50 +0000

On 2021-02-04, 16:43, "Core-talk on behalf of Michael Davidsaver via Core-talk" <core-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov on behalf of core-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:

    > In such a tool, I would support and encourage all kinds of intelligent hints for improving databases, showing similar options for typos being the simplest example.
    > (What about "Engineers that used the calcout record also often use the seq and compress records.")
    > 
    > "Fixing" bugs on the fly? Rather not. Large blocks of explanations and suggestions on the IOC console? Rather not.

    Fair enough.  The are certainly diminishing returns for longer error messages.

There are diminishing returns for longer error messages, but it's still probably good to have more descriptive ones:

  Can't set "foo.SCAN" to "10 seconds" Extraneous characters
  Error at or before ")" in path "."  file "badchoice.db" line 2
  dbLoadRecords: failed to load 'badchoice.db'
  Error: Failed to load: badchoice.db

Doesn't tell you what the problem is or how to fix it, but

  Can't set "foo.SCAN" to "10 seconds" Extraneous characters
  Menu Choices:
     "Passive"
     "Event"
     "I/O Intr"
     "10 second"
     "5 second"
     "2 second"
     "1 second"
     ".5 second"
     ".2 second"
     ".1 second"
  Error at or before ")" in path "."  file "badchoice.db" line 2
  dbLoadRecords: failed to load 'badchoice.db'
  Error: Failed to load: badchoice.db 

Or some variant does. But maybe a message such as 'Can't set "foo.SCAN" to "10 seconds" - invalid menu choice' could satisfy both criteria?

Cheers,

-- 
Simon Rose
Software Engineer
European Spallation Source

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System