OnFailure Action List Removed?

Automise Discussion
1

Hi guys, maybe I’m having a brain fart here, but it seems like the OnFailure action list has been removed from Automise (I’m running v5 b1258)…

Please tell me that’s not true! It will be a right pain in the butt to wrap everything in Try/Catch actions when you only want to be alerted when an unexpected error is thrown (and have the log attached)…

If it has been removed (for some reason), can I ask you add a feature to optionally allow it back (perhaps at the project property level?)

Thanks, TJ

2

Hi TJ

Yes it was removed in Automise 5.0 - it was removed because it was the cause of a lot of corner case issues that were impossible to resolve. It was a difficult decision to remove it, since it’s been there since AT1, but after going around in circles for months trying to resolve a bunch of issues without causing new ones, removing it cleaned up the design a lot, and we were then easily able to deal with those issues.

Old (at4 and earlier) projects are automatically converted to add the try catch. If you look at how that is done, you will see it’s pretty simple to achieve the same result. Hint, wrapping an action in a try/catch is easy, right click, refactoring, wrap…

3

So now that work has been done, are you saying it still makes sense to leave that incredibly useful feature out? Or are you saying now everything has been refactored that adding it back in would be easier?

Surely though when automise ends a run it knows if it errored out or ran to completion. Isn’t it conceivable then to optionally catch it before it ends and pass control to an action list?

Having a generic error handling option make life soo much easier and allows for code reuse, but if it’s gone it’s gone…

TJ

4

We don’t have any plans to add it back in. Whilst it might seem like a simple thing to do, it adds a huge amount of complexity to managing state and we would just end up where we were before (fix one corner case, introduce another) - ie what happens when there is an error in the OnFailure actionlist.

We are looking at adding a project template feature for AT6, so it will be possible to define a default new project with the try/catch onfailure etc already setup.

5

Thanks Vincent, it seems if you wrap the main code in Try/Catch, its honored in other called action lists, so that seems to work just fine, thanks for the explanation.

While you’re working on AT6, can you add an option to the Variables Editor to hide a variables default value and/or encrypt the default value please. Often my variables hold login information etc. and it would be nice to not have clear text login info in the open for anyone to see…

Thanks, TJ

6

That is planned - we did some work on it a while ago but it was waiting on some other changes (now completed) so I hope we’ll get that done soon… still dealing with high dpi support (replacing 2000 images) but starting to see light at the end of the tunnel!