Thread: STATUS_MESSAGES
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Old October 20th, 2009   #13
ericthegeek
Task Group Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2008
Posts: 375
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There's no standardized way to enunciate the end of an error condition.

There's been some discussion about this among the task group lately without reaching any real conclusion. It's a dicey issue that can't get any official resolution until the entire E1.20 document is opened for revisions.

One way is to report status messages only when they first occur. This seems to be what's envisioned in the text of the standard since the text says "The previously delivered status messages shall be cleared from the reporting queue once they have been successfully delivered to the Controller."

The problem with this is that if a status message is lost (for whatever reason), you have no way to get that message again unless it's re-reported sometime later. But, you also don't want to fill up someone's error logs with tons of inconsequential status messages.

My personal opinion is that status messages should be reported when they first occur, and then re-reported when it makes sense for that particular message. You'd want to re-report "dimmer on fire" every few seconds since it's darn important, and isn't likely to last very long. "Speck of Dust on the LCD display" isn't very important and could last for months. You might want to re-report it once a day, or once a week.

It's probably also desirable to re-report all status messages when you detect that DMX signal has been lost (indicating that a new console may have been connected).

This opinion is not based on anything in the text of the standard. It's my attempt to work out a way of dealing with lost messages that fits within the framework of the text. Others (some of who read this forum) strongly disagree with me on this.
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