We’re both speaking English, but it’s not the same language.
Sorry it’s been so long since I last wrote — it’s been a busy time here at Questek. We’re moving next week into our fancy new office space, so between arranging movers, picking paint colours, selecting new chairs, buying new desks, and ensuring that the layout is going to work… well, you can expect I’ve not had much time to write!
One of the things that I’ve been working on is finding places in the software that show error messages when they should instead show information messages. A great example is the “record is locked” error, which currently shows up as a pretty non-informative error dialog that looks kind of like this:
This is our standard “something didn’t go according to plan” dialog — it allows you to send us the error report so we can track down why the problem is occuring and fix it. But there is a problem here: this isn’t an error.
This is, in fact, a standard issue with most database products. Someone is making changes to an applicant or a client, and you try to edit it so that you can make changes and the system says “hey, you can’t do that, because TJ is already doing that!” Well, that’s what it should say, but instead it’s saying “dbApplicants: Error 5035: The requested lock could not be granted. The file or record may be locked by another user.” No wonder people don’t know what that means — it’s too cryptic for most people.
What’s the solution? Well, we’re introducing a new message that isn’t an error, but should get across things much more clearly:
This gives you a lot of information about what is going on. It tells you that the applicant has been locked, who has locked it, the machine they locked it on, and a friendly message explaining that you’ll need to wait until they’ve finished editing the applicant before you can do so.
Of course, this may not answer the “why does this happen?” question, so there is a small “more information” button. When you press it, the dialog explains a little more:
We’re going to be making use of these types of dialog throughout the 8.1 release of Humanis, trying to make things a little friendlier and a little more easy to understand.