Black Box

[skiwi]

Here is a thought for version 8. I have EA crash on me from time to time (probably on average monthly). All I get is a tiny dialogue box, I'm not sure how much info this gives Sparx so they and find an fix such faults, so I tend not to report - cause how hard is it to remember what you were doing, document it, export the related objects, yadda yadda. I propose, for version 8, some instrumentation added to EA, that provides a broader crash dump, log of recent user actions, export of objects, etc etc. Then as a user I could simply add this file to my registered user fault report and get a glow from being a good guy and providing feedback to improve the product. Thoughts? Support?

[fwoolz]

Ski,

Capital idea! EA crashes are not frequent enough to cause me to pull out my hair (there's precious little of it left as it is), but it would be very useful to have better crash error messages, mini-dumps, etc.

Fred

[mrf]

Crashes are treated with the highest priority here and we are always keen to resolve them as soon as we can.

If you encounter a crash, then the most important pieces of information you can give us are:

1. The memory address of the crash (available from the standard Windows "An error has occured" dialog. I think it's under View error report contents somewhere)
2. What version/build of EA you are using
3. What you were doing at the time when the crash occured

From there we can perform some forensic analysis, checking the instructions at the particular memory address you've given within the context of what you were doing at the time.

[skiwi]

OK, will do.

But its this "what are you doing" bit that bothers me.
Often I'm "in the zone" and when it breaks I can't remember exactly what steps I did, hence the request for a "flight recorder" - why not simply keep a log of recent actions - it will be more complete and accurate than my recollections, and it can include the version number of all components, system information etc.

[Sunshine]

On the one hand this would be useful however on the other, be careful what you ask for as putting instrumentation on applications usually has a negative effect on performance.  

[skiwi]

Fair point, but for the modelling we are doing we don't generally notice any performance issues, except where large numbers of database accesses are required (eg applying locks), so I don't see this as being a problem.
In any case I would expect this to be an option that could be switched on or off, or perhaps set to several levels.

[skiwi]

Here is an example of some information that could be captured
1. EA version/build.
2. DBMS and version being imported.
3. Drivers used.
4. At what point does it fail.
5. Optionally information about the database being imported (eg schema).

[beginner]

I'd like to add the following: when loading an MDG which has errors inside, EA silently turns off the MDG in question. The least I would expect is an error message/log in the Output. More helpful would be a hint what's wrong with the MDG since for now I'm left to a good guess by myself.

b.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

I'd like to add the following: when loading an MDG which has errors inside, EA silently turns off the MDG in question. The least I would expect is an error message/log in the Output. More helpful would be a hint what's wrong with the MDG since for now I'm left to a good guess by myself.

b.

I heartily endorse this...  The notion of programs silently failing (or worse as here - intervening) is anathema!  

If EA knows I've done something wrong, it should tell me!  Getting MDGs that don't work to work is one of the more frustrating areas of EA!

Paolo

[Sunshine]

Fair point, but for the modelling we are doing we don't generally notice any performance issues, except where large numbers of database accesses are required (eg applying locks), so I don't see this as being a problem.
In any case I would expect this to be an option that could be switched on or off, or perhaps set to several levels.

You clearly haven't seen how chatty EA is on the database.  
However, I agree with your suggestion of having an option to switch on  or off tracing that way if it does have an effect on performance it can be switched off.