nsepetys, Member
Hello myDBR Support,
Is there a way I can provide a user friendly "Contact Reporting Team" (or similar) message to our end-users (non myDBR admin folks) when mydbr procs error out? Essentially, I'd like to swap out the div content of the enote class text to provide an easy method for contacting myself and the team to provide quick assistance if one of our reports goes completely defunct and cannot be executed.
Thanks,
Noah
myDBR Team, Key Master
The enote is just a CSS class doing formatting. It's not about the content. What is the errror you are getting (what text you would like to override) and more importantly, why?
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myDBR Team
nsepetys, Member
Any admin only errors are silent errors that result in blank pages for the end-user. These errors can pop up for a variety of reasons. But the sad truth is that the myDBR reporting environment pulls from a replication-based slave and sometimes we don't get all the launch plan changes that affect the schema from which we pull. Here's an example of a non-existent report proc (ie really bad launch plan scenario)-
Or more commonly with uncommunicated schema changes-
Bad inter-company communication aside- the reason why we'd want to provide a message is because an end user probably won't understand what a blank page means. A generic "contact us" with a link would allow them to get in contact with us and could simply explain there is a "glitch" and that we will diagnose and resolve once informed of the issue.
Even if there was a way to analyze the myDBR statistics inserts for this info so that we could proactively address that would be helpful. But I'm afraid labeling reports as "broken" from that info would be inconsistent at best. This isn't a have to have feature. It'd just be nice to know if we have options with the myDBR framework in its current state.
myDBR Team, Key Master
While the reason for the errors in your setup is somewhat unorthodox (they should not happen), we can take a look if we can improve the non-admin user error messages.
Do you have an example of a silent error situation?
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myDBR Team
nsepetys, Member
Heck, if we're alone in our situation and no one else using myDBR experiences issues with end-users hitting "blank pages" then leave this alone. But if others are experiencing it then by all means lets look at the options for the framework.
Here's another case that I replicated from an incident that happened a little while ago-
myDBR Admin View:
myDBR End-User View:
myDBR Team, Key Master
Noah,
we certainly want to provide good error messages for every user.
myDBR error messages have usually been towards the developer as usually user's should not see that many errors. In your case where you run the reports after incomplete replication, your users may be more prone to see errors.
In general users should get an error message out of an error, whether an admin user or a normal user. This is why we asked about an example. Sometimes error messages may have hidden due to the fact that the error happens in a situation where incorrect HTML is being produced (report contains HTML code which after the error is incomplete and causes the error message be hidden). If you find a situation where no error message is shown even if it should, we'd be interested in that.
Your suggestion for more human like errors for users was a good one and we've prepared a build which you can try out. The $mydbr_defaults has now an entry 'server_error' which defines how user's errors are shown (no change errors for admin). You enable the more generic error / human like messages by setting:
$mydbr_defaults['server_error']['show_full_error_message_to_non_admin'] = false;
in your user/defaults.php.
If you also set the admin_mail_address under server_error, user will be shown a mailto link with the URL causing the error in body.
Let us know if you have more questions / suggestions.
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myDBR Team
nsepetys, Member
Thanks for implementing a feature for this. We'll have to let you know how it works out once we get things updated here.
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