Well normally I don’t have time during work to write these little posts but today our Teamworks Development server has been down for 3 hours and I’ve run out of other things to do while waiting for it to come up.

So I’d like to take a moment to highlight that over the course of 8 months, the pain involved in debugging a failed Process Instances has reduced significantly.

Then: Extremely Difficult and Painful
Now: Slightly Difficult and Painful

By my definition, there are 2 category of Teamworks errors that can kill a Process Instance:
 - GOOD (those that provide an error message)
 - BAD (those that do not -  i.e. "No error information available.");
 

By this definition, most of the errors I get are GOOD errors but I still get 1 BAD error every week or so.

When I started out, it usually took me an hour to resolve a GOOD error and days to resolve a BAD one.  Now, I can resolve the GOOD errors in a couple of minutes and the BAD ones only take a couple of hours.

And by "resolve" I mean the error message goes away and the process instance doesn’t go into a failed state.  It does NOT mean I know what caused the problem nor know what I did to make it go away.

With experience it does get easier so I’m glad that has improved. 

But I’m still disappointed I have to waste hours on Teamworks error with no error information.  I’m baffled that Teamworks can have an error and not be able to tell me where or why it occurred.

:-(

I have no clue what a narrative is but don’t you dare ever go and delete one.

Today we got an error message that basically said: "No more error info available."  So I started trying a bunch of different things trying to figure out what was wrong. After working on this for over  4 HOURS, I come across a line in the debug log that says "Premature end of binary stream after reading 0 bytes".

Searching their website for that text lead me to exactly 1 hit.  The result said that the problem was that a process item had a "narrative" and then someone probably removed it.

Normally, I would have dismissed this error as unrelated.  However, earlier I ran a dif tool that I wrote (why Lombardi doesn’t know how to write this kind of tool is beyond me) and saw that someone had changed a description and removed a "narative".

So - I stuck a narrative back in and now everything works.  Another 4 hours of my life I won’t get back because of Teamworks.

I’m just lucky I’d written my own dif tool or I’d still be looking.  I pity anyone that doesn’t have the ability to do a DIF on Teamworks stuff.