7.1

Error Handling
This section explains how you can build specific error behaviors into your configuration to determine exactly what is to happen
when a something fails.
This section presents the error handling features built into PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools and explains how to set error han-
dling properties for branches, conditions and tasks.
About Error Handling
When your process is running, or during debugging, it may happen that the task that is currently running causes an error, and
the task fails. For example, when trying to save to a folder that does not exist, or printing to a printer that cannot be found.
When such an error occurs, in most cases you would want to be aware of it and to take certain actions in order to correct or
report the error. This is where our error handling features come in handy.
Most of the tasks, branches and conditions included in your process can have their own error handling behavior, with the
exception of comments, the Error Input Bin input task, and older legacy tasks from previous versions of PlanetPress Suite that
did not have error handling.
By default, when an error occurs, the task is skipped and the unmodified job file is passed on to the next task. You can over-
write this behavior by changing the options of the On Error tab of the task.
Error Handling Tools
PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools includes various error detection, warning and handling options. These are divided into the
following categories:
l SNMP condition tasks can check the status of printers (or other SNMP compatible devices) and reroute jobs along dif-
ferent branches of a process. For example, an SNMP condition task might check if a printer was out of paper or toner
(see “SNMP Condition Properties” in the Reference Help).
l When a Text Condition task is used to test numeric values, the numeric error option sets the exact behavior desired
when an error is encountered.
l Notification messages can warn you in a variety of situations, such as when you are about to perform an action that
has an impact on the current process or configuration.
l PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools logs can be configured to contain very little information as well as every system
event with all the available details.
l PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools can back up outgoing jobs when an output service cannot properly dispatch the job
to its destination such as PlanetPress Image and PlanetPress Fax.
l The On Error tab of any task can be used to handle errors that occur in the task. It can be used to stop the process or
branch, ignore the task or send the job file to an error-handling process.
Furthermore, PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools Configuration’s Debug mode is a powerful tool that can be used to resolve
many of the errors that hide in your processes before your configuration is sent to the PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools serv-
ice (see "Debugging PlanetPress Suite Processes" (page 189)).
Creating and Using Error Processes
An Error Process is a special type of process that never runs on its own, and cannot be called using the GoSub or Send to Proc-
ess tasks. It can only be used in the On Error tab of a task in your process, and will be triggered if the Send to Process option is
Error Handling
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