7.3

Table Of Contents

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.

Using the On Error tab

Whenever an error is triggered either during debugging or when a process runs in production, the settings specified in the On

Error tab of the task that generated the error will be used to determine a course of action.

On Error Tab

The On Error Tab is common to all tasks. Details can be found on "Task Properties Dialog" (page 54).

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

checked in that tab and an error process is selected in the drop-down list.

To create an error process, simply replace the initial input task by the InputErrorBin Input Task, and that process auto-

matically becomes able to handle error jobs sent to it. It is up to you, however, to decide how that error job will be handled.

For example, you could place the job file in a specific folder, then send an email to a supervisor indicating that a job has failed.

Or you could update a database with an error status so that it appears on a customer's online order. You could also zip the

order up and send it to an administrator, while simultaneously advising the person that sent the job that it failed.

You can have as many error processes as you can normal processes - that is, you are limited to 512 processes, subprocesses,

startup processes and error processes combined.

The following information is available from within your information process when it is triggered:

l Job Information variables (%1 to %9)

l The data file as it was before starting the task

l Global variables (which are, of course, available anywhere)

Note that local variables in the process are not sent to error processes, even if the error process has a variable of the same

name.

Debugging and Error Handling