just wanted to checkout the new help features in gamma and the first document i opened was “xml overview”. upon opening execution immediately stops due to an exception of the parse node (complaining it does not have a root node).
while the cause for the exception is clear i’d argue this (and probably other related) node(s) should not behave this way (throwing exceptions immediately) but rather signal a “softer” kind of error instead of throwing exceptions. for beginners, who might just have opened the help browser the first time, this is probably pretty confusing. to add to the confusion even more, since execution is paused, also the helpbrowser does not react any more and to uninformed individuals the program appears to be crashed.
Yeah, stupid me I guess.
This occurred on a fresh install but since the settings.xml is global to all gamma installations and I had RuntimePauseOnError set to true earlier. Thanks for pointing that out.
This raises two questions for me:
What’s the easiest way to have different setting-files for different gamma installations (might be handy to have occasionally).
Should the Help-Browser be locked on pause? --> will open another post for this one.
but also generally we should add that consistent error handling is one of the the bigger topics we haven’t tackled yet.
in beta we mostly “covered” for all errors somehow and some nodes got “Success” or similar outputs. later we introduced “Error Handling Style” for nodes like the division node where you sometimes don’t care if it throws a division by zero, other times you wanna know…
in gamma so far we also have some nodes with a “Success” output, some even have a “Default” input that they can return use in case they fail… others simply throw their exceptions which leads to pink nodes and half the program stops running. this is where you can use one of the experimental try/catch regions to handle the error manually…
so you see all still rather inconsistent. but we are aware of it and know that it is one of the more important things to get right.
