Hussein, The problem with this error box from a GUI perspective is that there is WAY too much information. For a technical person, this is fine because he can read all of this and it somewhat makes sense. However, someone not familiar with the XML -> FO -> PDF internals will have almost no understanding of the bottom box. "Permission denied" is buried at the end of the 6th line. How is a lay user to know THAT is the problem and the problem isn't "Cannot copy" or "Command execution failed" (well, these are higher level problems.
Suggestion 1: Put the error reason up front like this: Error: Permission Denied Cannot copy ... to ... Suggestion 2: Have the "Details" box as an optional drop down with a little ">" that you can click on to turn to "V" (like OSX when copying many files). Or have a "Details" button like Windows GPF's. This way the technical person can see the data, but the non-technical person doesn't get inundated. The second problem is that although "permission denied" tells the user the problem, but it doesn't tell the user how to SOLVE the problem. I would add, in the case of "Permission Denied", "Check if this file isn't open in another application". (Permission denied can happen for other reasons, but on a windows machine, this is the main reason you can't write to a file). The other option is to have a "Help" button. When the user clicks on that, it brings up a box that suggests how to fix the problem. Rishi On Apr 23, 2009, at 3:16 AM, Hussein Shafie wrote: > Andy Black wrote: >> >> Some PDF reader applications lock the PDF file they are >> displaying. One >> implication of this is that if a user tries to re-generate a PDF file >> from within XXE while that file is currently being viewed in the PDF >> reader, then the generation process will result in a "command >> execution >> has failed" message. (Well, at least it does for my configuration >> files...). >> >> My question is this: is there a way within the XXE configuration >> files >> to detect if the PDF file that is about to be generated is in a state >> where this situation will happen? If so, I'd like to then give >> the user >> a message saying that they need to remove the PDF from their PDF >> reader. >> >> I'd be happy with any kind of detection such as >> cannot delete the file >> file is being used by another application >> the reader has the file open already >> or any other conceivable way to detect this situation. I want to >> avoid >> users being confused by this scenario. Most likely they will think >> something on the order of "I just created the PDF file a few minutes >> ago. Why won't it generate it now?" and be frustrated. >> > > The error message issued by the operating system should be crystal- > clear > in such case. > > This error message is indeed reported by XMLmind XML Editor. See > attached screenshot. Notice the "(Permission denied)" error cause. On > Windows, error causes are even more explicit (e.g. "file is being used > by another application"). > > No offense intended, but are you sure that your users actually read > what > is displayed by the error dialog box before clicking OK? > > > > <error_dialog_box.png> > -- > XMLmind XML Editor Support List > xmleditor-support at xmlmind.com > http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/xmleditor-support
