Netlinx Diagnostics and text searching

Spannertech

Had a day yesterday where I all but gave up trusting Notifications . Very frustrating. Does anyone else ever use it? I was literally seeing *some* button presses reported but not others. For some reason it often reported button 1001 as being pressed, and I didn't even have a button 1001. With strings to and from selected for all devices, I still wasn't seeing everything, but then if I added a line to watch strings to and from a particular device, suddenly they'd appear. Why can't this be fixed? And why can't you watch strings to/from IP devices? I was in a situation where I couldn't watch the front of the NXI to see rx and tx activity, and realized how limiting this was - unable to trust this diagnostic tool at all. Grrrrrr.

Also, when are they going to fix text searching?? The latest NS release still has the same problem. It fails to find anything the first time more than half the time. Close the box and do the search again and suddenly it finds stuff. If you inherit someone else's work, the ONLY way to trace what a particular button does is knowing the channel number, then searching for instances of it (and you can't look for [TP,x] because x might already be declared within a button array). Those of us who also work on the other side know the power of F2.

OP

mpullin

Whereas I haven't experienced most of the stuff you mentioned, I second your comment on not being able to watch strings on IP ports. That would really help a lot.

DHawthorne

I use device notifications, but only in a few limited circumstances. Mostly, I use it to get a general idea of system traffic, or to see if a particular device is responding real time. It's generally more useful to create a debug handler of some sort. Set a flag, and send messages to the terminal (device 0) if the flag is on. Then intersperse your code with calls to the debug function when key operations are taking place. This, combined with variable watching, can be a very powerful troubleshooting tool. Another advantage of this is that if you are logging messages, you can get a history of events that are sending these debug messages as well.