It seems to me that the hierarchical structure of an FB scrpt is underused. Currently the relationship parent-child basically means “if parent succeeds, run child”. But so does sibling1-sibling2. And there are lots of times when you want to run the child if the parent fails. And yet “If Prev Action Failed” just looks and feels ugly and wrong - especially since it only works if “Ignore failure” is ticked. “Ignore failure” is blatantly misleading when you’re about to take action if it fails.
So, my proposal: Create two new action types, one called “Success” and one called “Failure”. The first runs if its parent succeeds. The other runs only if its parent fails - regardless of the “Ignore failure” setting. This would let you set up very readable trees like this:
Compile program
-Success
–Zip up result
–Write “success” to text file
-Failure
–Write “error compiling” to text file
Compile next program
Advantages of the above:
- No misleading “Ignore failure” - build would automatically stop after the “Write error compiling” action
- (related) No “Error ignored” in the log
- Totally self contained - the “Compile program” node contains all behaviour related to that action, without needing siblings (If Prev Action Failed) or parents (Try/Catch).
- Very readable
- Almost always syntactically valid (unlike try/catch/endtry). The only bad combinations would be success or failure as top-level nodes, or perhaps one directly under the other, which is just meaningless.
Users could also then have a choice of what the default behaviour of a parent-child link is: success or failure. Either way you could override it with an explicit Success or Failure action.
Steve