Alert setTimeout FOREVER

So you are showing error messages, but no emails are coming in. Is your application faultless? Or all users do not bother to write down some lines and click send?

Maybe your users do not have a chance to see the error message because it was automatically dismissed before they could read it. How can it happen? - you ask.

Not calling setTimeout method on an Alert object will leave the timeout as the default value. Which value? The Virtual Machine implementation will decide, but the more important part: it is not Alert.FOREVER!

From Alert documentation (the very first line): "An alert is a screen that shows data to the user and waits for a certain period of time before proceeding to the next Displayable."

See? If you, sloppy developer, does not set a timeout the Alert will be automatically dismissed and your user will blink and ask "What was that?".

To the rescue an updated version of showExceptionAlert method below:

public void showExceptionAlert (Exception e) {
  StringBuffer msg = new StringBuffer(getErrorMessage());
  Display d = Display.getDisplay(this);

  msg.append(e.getClass().getName());
  if (e.getMessage() != null) {
    msg.append("\n").append(e.getMessage());
  }

  Alert a = new Alert(getErrorTitle(), msg.toString(), 
      null /*alertImage*/, AlertType.ERROR);
  a.setTimeout(Alert.FOREVER);
  d.setCurrent(a, d.getCurrent());
}

getErrorMessage() will load the message prefix and getErrorTitle() will load the Alert title based on current locale (i18n).

Related topics:

• Showing error messages