Technical session: "Advanced Error Handling in LabVIEW" by Ryan King

[AristosQueue (NI)]

On Monday at NIWeek, Ryan King presented "Advanced Error Handling". This session will be reprised today at 3:30pm. I encourage anyone writing applications with LabVIEW to attend Ryan's talk.

Error handling is a tricky topic. It is far more than "skip downstream functions if error in is set" and "display an error in a dialog box". There are times when you need to trap an error and translate it to a different error. There are times when you need to retry a function until the error does not occur. There are times when you just need to suppress the error. And then there are an endless list of activities that you might need to do in your particular app to compensate for a specific error ("hardware on fire" may require "start fire suppression system").

Ryan walks the audience through APIs available from National Instruments and third parties to create a truly robust error generation-propagation-handling-reporting system -- far more comprehensive than General Error Handler.vi. Even if you don't absorb all the details about error handling in this one session, you will at least have a better awareness of the complexity of the problem, so the next time you're writing an application, you can pause and think about that error wire and whether it's really doing what your system needs it to do.