Notification Area issues

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chrisb
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by chrisb »

I see that there is a market for "quick and dirty" models. But propagating this as a default shouldn't be an option. FreeCAD being an open source program may need more than just the classial 3 message levels: There are the well known messages directed to the users, which could be divided into errors, warnings and informations. And there may be messages, which should be forwarded to the developers, because they indicate something that would be of interest for them. I'm not sure if such "developer messages" should be divided into different classes as well.

Errors are situations which must be handled, which means at least to understand (faintly) what it means.

Warnings are situations which should be handled. If not, the warning should be removed or downgraded to an information. For "fire and forget" models, you can always ignore such messages as long as the result is ok.
But FreeCAD is a parametric modeler which offers more than possibly not reusable models. If a warning helps to build a better model, then such warnings are especially interesting for newbies.

The "Link goes out of allowed range" is a very special situation: FreeCAD produces here in most cases sensible results even when used outside of its specification. Hoping that nothing bad will happen is ok, if you can somehow validate the result and be happy with it. But this should not be a design principle, because such behaviour can always be changed in future versions, or lead to problems in further steps or when changing a previous step.
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abdullah
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by abdullah »

chrisb wrote: Sat Mar 18, 2023 10:19 am The "Link goes out of allowed range" is a very special situation: FreeCAD produces here in most cases sensible results even when used outside of its specification. Hoping that nothing bad will happen is ok, if you can somehow validate the result and be happy with it. But this should not be a design principle, because such behaviour can always be changed in future versions, or lead to problems in further steps or when changing a previous step.
+1

... and then, when that happens, a thousand thought-to-be-reusable industrial-grade models stop being reusable and need to be redone.
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uwestoehr
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by uwestoehr »

wmayer wrote: Sat Mar 18, 2023 10:08 am As Abdullah already has pointed out ignoring Qt warnings in general is a bad advice. A warning is not printed to annoy the user but is an indication that the API is not used correctly.
My point is different:
- average users should not see Qt warnings, but developers should
- therefore the default should be not to show warnings. We developers will set the option to also show warnings, and also experiences users might want to do so.

Remember one of the main complaints during the Brussels session that people don't want to feel they need to become developers just to use FC. This case here is exactly this. special warnings are for experienced persons and devs, not for the average user who has to be productive with his parts.
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uwestoehr
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by uwestoehr »

chrisb wrote: Sat Mar 18, 2023 10:19 am I see that there is a market for "quick and dirty" models.
@chris, please don't take this personally, the following is a general rant ;) :

I have severe problems that I hear I would do quick'n dirty stuff. I have a running production. My product uses 3D-printed parts and we have employees and students in the production and design.

I for example hire a student who comes over for 10 hours a week to help me with the 3D design. His task is to adjust parts in the CAD, print them, then adjust the part depending on the printing results.

I think you can imagine how it feels when he called me "I see a warning, what does this mean". Then I have to come over, check, often I don't have a clue at all and in the end I turned off warnings for him. His task is to print parts and this works well.
Why are you forcing average users to become FreeCAD masters? FreeCAD is just a tool, as the slicing software of the printer is, as Inkscape is for illustrations and Word is to write the report.
We have customers, they need a change within a week, so we start actions. There is no time to dive into the FreeCAD details. "Can I redesign and print the part", that is the question.
Last but not least, every half an hour my employee spends in checking what a warning means cost money and time.

So sorry, please check other CAD software. Is e.g. Solidworks forcing you to become a master? No, you can turn on to get more info/hints/notes/warnings if you like. But it is up to you. By default they are off.

And again, my employee is just a user. It is not his task to check internals of a software, (of no software). I as FC dev have the duty to check what is going on/wrong, but definitely not an employee.

So please refer to what I exactly wrote and don't use the wording quick'n dirty. I have to live from my products, so I have to assure a good quality.

I fought hard that in FC 0.20 we disable warnings by default, let experts see them if they like. If you now turn back the wheel, it will harm me also by money because of the more time my people need to fulfill their tasks and I have to pay them for the time.
abdullah
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by abdullah »

uwestoehr wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 4:14 pm I think you can imaging how it feels when he called me "I see a warning, what does this mean". Then I have to come over, check, often I don't have a clue at all and in the end I turned off warnings for him. His task is to print parts and this works well.
If you can assume the task you do works well, then you can just tell your student to ignore all warnings... or remove the notification area in preferences.

While we might have warnings we should remove (and we will), warnings generally tell something (or they should not be there). Improving warnings may be a good vector of improvement for FreeCAD.
uwestoehr wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 4:14 pm We have customers, they need a change within a week, so we start actions. There is no time to dive into the FreeCAD details. "Can I redesign and print the part", that is the question.
Last but not least, every half an hour my employee spends in checking what a warning means cost money and time.

So please refer to what I exactly wrote and don't use the wording quick'n dirty. I have to live from my products, so I have to assure a good quality.
Every branch wants short lead times, high productivity, low costs and good quality.

I think you are arguing that FreeCAD produces non-meaningful warnings and errors.

Meaningful warnings and errors can impact your lead time by reducing the amount of prototype cycles, and thus reducing your cost. They can help you with your quality too.
uwestoehr wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 4:14 pm I fought hard that in FC 0.20 we disable warnings by default, let experts see them if they like. If you now turn back the wheel, it will harm me also by money because of the more time my people need to fulfill their tasks and I have to pay them for the time.
What does it mean to disable warnings by default exactly? (which preference or preferences were changed)

I can also make this aspect configurable. So that the Notification Area will not subscribe to warnings. Then you will only have errors and notifications. Would that be helpful for you?
Syres
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by Syres »

abdullah wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 6:52 pm What does it mean to disable warnings by default exactly? (which preference or preferences were changed)
You've unintentionally misinterpreted Uwe's comment, a good example was raised this morning, a user has created a perfectly good sheetmetal object and they happen to have a Part object in the document and there's an error in the Report View. But the error isn't because the object's broken it's just that the error handling hasn't 'forseen' this rare event. Therefore I've PR'd an improvement (see https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/8969) to only produce a log message which most users won't see. This is what Uwe was getting at for warnings in the 0.20 dev cycle.
abdullah
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by abdullah »

Syres wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 7:02 pm But the error isn't because the object's broken it's just that the error handling hasn't 'forseen' this rare event.
Uwe is saying that he fought hard in FC 0.20 to disable warnings by default. You are saying that some warnings are wrong and we should fix them.

Uwe is saying that he loses money with each warning that appears. You are fixing warnings so that they do not appear.

The way I had imagined this would go is we fixing warnings that are wrong so that they do not appear (as you comment). But I see that Uwe needs a way not to lose money.
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adrianinsaval
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by adrianinsaval »

Syres wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 7:02 pm You've unintentionally misinterpreted Uwe's comment, a good example was raised this morning, a user has created a perfectly good sheetmetal object and they happen to have a Part object in the document and there's an error in the Report View. But the error isn't because the object's broken it's just that the error handling hasn't 'forseen' this rare event. Therefore I've PR'd an improvement (see https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/8969) to only produce a log message which most users won't see. This is what Uwe was getting at for warnings in the 0.20 dev cycle.
No in 0.20 we disabled raising the report view by default whenever a warning was shown, the warning is still there in the report view and in the status bar if you care about it, but it doesn't popup on your face anymore unless you go and enable that yourself (or have it enabled from an old config)
xtemp09
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by xtemp09 »

abdullah, do you have plans on adding Windows Toast notifications or KDE KNotifications as back-end?
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uwestoehr
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Re: Notification Area issues

Post by uwestoehr »

adrianinsaval wrote: Tue Mar 21, 2023 12:24 am No in 0.20 we disabled raising the report view by default whenever a warning was shown, the warning is still there in the report view and in the status bar if you care about it, but it doesn't popup on your face anymore unless you go and enable that yourself (or have it enabled from an old config)
@abdullah , this is what I refer to. By default warnings are not shown in FC 0.20. If you want to look behind the scenes, you can open the report view and there check given warnings or ignore them.

So all I want is an option in the notification settings called "don't popup for warnings". This option is by default on. Experienced users can turn it off and see the popup also for warnings.
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