ISCErrorReporterExtension

Last updated on: 5/1/2013 11:28 AM 
Created on: 11/2/2016 2:22 PM 

One of the biggest challenges in developing any solution is the handling of the actions to take when something goes wrong. The normal flow of the logic is now interrupted. In addition to freeing memory, cleaning up temporary files, and returning the user to a stable state there is the additional challenges of generating the textual description of the error, reporting that to the user and optionally creating an entry in the system event logs. Starting with Windows 7 additional UI feedback is provided by turning the task bar icon red to indicate a program (which may be running in the background) has an error to report.

To streamline the process of generating the error message, displaying it to the user and recording it to the event log, an error reporter system was created. The framework handles the standard actions to take such as generating dialog boxes, performing operating system specific alerts, and generating event log entries. To perform the custom work of generating error text or taking any additional action, the ISCErrorReporterExtension() class must be implement.

To attempt to prevent duplicate error codes the framework provides applets with the base value in which they can begin to enumerate their specific error messages. Currently this is done at compiler time through the use of defines and macros but may be expanded in the future to including dynamic loading of modules. The ISCErrorReporterExtension() implements the GetPostText() method which must generate the specific error message text for the error code. The framework uses all implementations of this interface to locate the proper text message.