I have just spent far too long trying to solve a problem that was caused by a hardcoded ActionLogTitle that didn't correspond to the properties of the action. I don't really know how it got like that - I guess I must have accidentally edited the field once when it had a different value, and it got 'stuck'.
Would it be worth considering having some sort of visual alert when properties like that are set? It can be such a dangerous thing when the action title or the action log title are set to something misleading.
In my case, I don't think I would ever want to set an action log title, so if there was a way to prevent it being set, or to periodically globally reset them all, that would be good too.
Steve - the action log title is settable because there are instances where someone might want it to be different from the Action Description. You must have changed it from the Action Inspector, right? Also, as soon as you change it then it’s not automatically updated (because presumably you wanted it to be a fixed value). If you blank it’s value out, then it defaults back to the Action Description and then will follow it if the Description changes.
I got this issue when I migrated from FB4 to FB5. I had an include fb prj action witch calls %FBPROJECTDIR%\BuildApp.fbp4 (as so the actionlogtitle was this), I opened the project to FB5, changed it to fbp5 (btw, we could have a variable with the current fbversion extension… ) and, when refactoring some actions I copied that one to another part of the script and changed it to call BuildSrv.fbp5. The actionlogtitle remained BuildApp. Sometimes I used to read the log and asked myself: “wasn’t to be called BuildSrv at this point?”, but the inner actions are from BuildSrv so I just thought that was a log issue and fb was messing around. Sometime later I saw that actionlogtitle was wrong (sorry to thought that was a fb log issue). I don’t know if the problem came when migrating from 4 to 5 or if it was when I copied that action and edited it.
Yeah, as I said, I understand why some people might want to change it, and I can set it back if I realise I'd changed it. I got burnt in this instance because I had no idea I'd changed it (must have accidentally hit a key on that field), and had no warning that that's what was going on. Perhaps you could even just indicate in the log that the message is not the default, like with a little asterisk or something.
If there was an option to totally disable manually changing that field, I would happily set it to avoid the risk of going through this again. For me it's sort of like flying an aircraft where you can get the altimeter to report any altitude you like: considering that you're basically trusting that meter with your life, I would want to avoid any possible way of getting a misleading result back from it. Maybe that's just me :)
Hi I agree that there might be a problem. And I also had once a problem with mismatch between the 2 items when it wasnt intended and caused problems. Most of the times, I would like them to be the same.
Thanks for the feedback, guys. We can probably add something to the logs so you can see when a log title is changed from the original, possibly the same way that actions with scripts, a run condition and/or a comment are marked in the main action list view.
) and, when refactoring some actions I copied that one to another part of the script and changed it to call BuildSrv.fbp5. The actionlogtitle remained BuildApp. Sometimes I used to read the log and asked myself: “wasn’t to be called BuildSrv at this point?”, but the inner actions are from BuildSrv so I just thought that was a log issue and fb was messing around. Sometime later I saw that actionlogtitle was wrong (sorry to thought that was a fb log issue).