[Seaside] No error message if DNU when downloading scripts from WAScriptLibrary subclasses

[Avi Bryant]

On Oct 31, 2004, at 8:56 AM, Yar Hwee Boon wrote:

> If a DNU (for eg., forgetting to put a ^) is raised while downloading 
> scripts through the WAScriptLibrary (and I guess styles from 
> WAStyleLibrary too) mechanism, the error message is only viewable if 
> you explicitly do a download of that script file. Should there be a 
> debug link? Since there was a discussion of logging the transcript 
> contents as a panel in the webpage, maybe it would be useful to show 
> an error message there?

The difficulty with alerting the user of this is that it's a separate 
request (handled in a separate process) from the main HTML request that 
actually gets displayed in the browser.  It also will always happen 
after the HTML content has been generated and delivered.  So although 
it could make something appear in the Transcript, a web-based 
Transcript log wouldn't show it until the next request happened.

One possibility would be to have the error reporting mechanism be 
somehow aware of the mime-type of the context it was supposed to be 
returning, so that instead of always returning an HTML error page, it 
could return, eg "alert('an error occured')" in the case of javascript, 
or maybe "body {background-color: red}" in the case of CSS.  This would 
cue the user to look deeper.

This must be a general problem with web applications; anyone know of 
clever solutions used by other systems?  Or is it so rare to have 
dynamic CSS/JS files that this doesn't come up?

Avi