Open printing to PDF <filename> error

[Bob Sneidar]

Yeah, error messages can be misleading sometimes. Often the command is simply returning a message the OS or API passed back to it, and that message can be less than helpful. For example, on copiers, when using StartTLS for encryption in SMTP communications, the server may reject the connection for a number of security reasons, but the error the copier always reports is "Login Failure" when in reality, the login information is correct. This can lead the uninitated down a rabbit hole if they try to change the password to what they think it might be. 

I was having fits getting a newly installed copier to scan to a customer's NAS file server. The error reported was "Login Failure". I verified credentials, did packet captures, sent them off to Konica, etc. Everyone was completely stumped. Turns out the top IT guy for the enterprise had decided to enable ACL's on the NAS devices, and he hadn't entered the MAC addresses for the new copiers yet. 

One other example: If Outlook attempts to connect to an Exchange server that is currently offline, it will present a login dialog. What percentage of end users do you think will STILL attempt to guess at their logins and passwords, even after telling them numerous times NOT TO GUESS. :-) So this is a problem with virtually everything that is going to interact with someone else's systems. 

Bob S


> On Apr 26, 2018, at 09:46 , Paul Dupuis via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> The file path is selected by the user through a standard 'answer file
> ... ' dialog. The code does not currently check to see if the folder the
> user selected for the file is writable, but tests of trying to save to a
> read-only (non writable) folder on Windows results in a controlled error
> dialog being presented by the 'open printing to pdf' statement rather
> than an code execution error.
> 
> Presumably the folder exists since it was just selected by the user via
> the 'answer file' command. Obviously, I can wrap this part of the code
> in a TRY ... END TRY block to catch any error and present a graceful
> message of something like "exporting to PDF failed", but I was hoping
> someone (perhaps a LiveCode employee???) might actually know what the
> error message of 'printing: Unknown destination' meant.