Error messages are mostly useless

[smallfavor]

There needs to be a way to review error messages easily.  At present when there is some issue a brief and vague notice arises momentarily in the lower left corner and disappears.  Trying to understand what the application requires is maddening at times and this makes it more so.  For an experienced user this may be desirable as they only need a moment to comprehend the matter, but for many others its a detriment to learning the application.  Can a list of errors be displayed in a box or area at the users discretion?   It would also be nice if more clarity was provided describing the conflict.

[chrisplyler]

Any item that errors will turn yellow or red in the timeline. Right-clicking on that yellow or red item in the timeline will bring up a contextual menu, from which you may select Review Error.

[smallfavor]

Thanks!

[TrippyLighting]

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@chrisplyler wrote:

Any item that errors will turn yellow or red in the timeline. Right-clicking on that yellow or red item in the timeline will bring up a contextual menu, from which you may select Review Error.

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While that is true, many error messages leave no indication as to what is wrong. They were clearly written by application developers and in specific terns that make only sense to them.

Also, rarely is the area on the model indicated where that error occurs which would help a lot in determining what is wrong.

There is no reason the error messages can be written in a way understandable by users.

[HughesTooling]

Some errors are transient as well, for a split second what you're doing might not be valid. An example that I see a lot is creating a flange in sheet metal, as you start to drag you get an error but when the height of the flange is valid the warning disappears. You can get the same on other commands while entering a value, if when you finish a command there's no warning at the bottom of the screen it's probably because the error was only transient.

Here's an example with flange.

Mark

[smallfavor]

Yes, I've noticed this aspect often when entering user p's.  After awhile one'd accustomed to disregarding the alerts - which can be counter productive now and again....

[etfrench]

The best you can hope for is someone else had the same problem and posted it somewhere on the Internet, sometimes even with a solution.

Good error messages will not only say what the error is, but also how to correct it.

I'm puzzled by the lack of action on fixing error messages.  It's been an issue from the beginning.

[smallfavor]

Indeed! There’s quite a few long standing puzzling things.