non-form error handling

[barbarah]

I have a pretty general development question: what's the best way to go about capturing errors/exceptions and then ultimately displaying an error message to the user in the template/UI? I see how this is done for HTML form errors, but it's unclear how this works (or should work) for non-html-form stuff. For example, I'm implementing some convert-to-pdf functionality and want to let the user know if their document wasn't able to be converted for some reason. I can't find examples in the existing PKP codebase to use as a model. Any pointers would be really useful. Thanks!

[mcrider]

Hi Barbarah,

We do this in pages/manager/PluginManagementHandler::_showInstallForm() (and others) for example -- though I'm not sure why thats not a form other than its too basic to require a full-fledged form class. Its typically best to use a Form class, but otherwise thats one example of how to show errors.

Cheers,
Matt

[barbarah]

Thanks for the quick response Matt! Do you have any working examples of functionality (ideally in OJS) that I can look at as an example?

[asmecher]

Hi all,

For the forthcoming OMP, we're making more use of the Notifications framework and it might be useful here as well. Barbarah, have a look at pages/admin/AdminSettingsHandler.inc.php at the very end of the file:

Code: Select all

import('classes.notification.NotificationManager');
$notificationManager = new NotificationManager();
$notificationManager->createTrivialNotification($user->getId());

This creates a "Your settings were saved" message. It's not an error condition, but you may be able to use the same structures to present an error as well; have a look at the NotificationManager's API.

This applies much more to OMP than OJS, but since they both share the same lib/pkp code including the base PKPNotificationManager class, it's worth investigating.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[barbarah]

Cool, thanks Alec. I was hoping OMP had more exception/notification handling in place :-)