Messages

Using messages

We’ve all been there: a crucial error message gets printed to the terminal, but lost in a tempest of text—noticing that error message could have saved two hours of debugging. Polyscope contains a simple system for showing message dialogs in the UI which are sure to be noticed but stay out of the way.

There are a few levels of messages available:

• error A very bad error; immediately shows and blocks the UI for user response.
• terminating error Like error, but terminates the program after being dismissed.
• warning A medium priorty warning, shown the next time UI main loop executes. Warnings of the same type can be batched together, so these messages can be issued in a dense loop without drowning the program.
• info A low-priority message, which is just printed to stdout.

Messages can be dismissed by clicking the button in dialog box, or pressing [space].

Example:

#include "polyscope/polyscope.h"

// Generate a single warning.
// Has no effect on the GUI until polyscope gets control flow
// back, which happens here in the show() call below.
polyscope::warning("Something went slightly wrong");

// Generate a lot of warnings. Becase all of these warnings 
// have the same base message (the first string), they will 
// be batched together and only shown as one dialog. The detail 
// message for the first such warning will also be shown.
for (int i = 0; i < 5000; i++) {
  polyscope::warning("Some problems come in groups", 
    "detail = " + std::to_string(i));
}

// The previous warnings would be displayed here
polyscope::show();

// Generating an error.
// The UI will block and show this error immediately. After 
// the error is dismissed, the call will return.
polyscope::error("Resistance is futile.");

// Generate a fatal error.
// After the error is dismissed, the program will terminate.
polyscope::terminatingError("Resistance is futile.");

Messages

void polyscope::info(std::string message)

info

Simply logs a message to stdout.

void polyscope::warning(std::string baseMessage, std::string detailMessage = "")

warning

Create a warning message, to be displayed the next time the UI gets flow control.

When issuing a one-off warning, the detailMessage field need not be used. However, if issuing warnings in a loop, warnings with the same baseMessage are batched together, so the UI doesn’t get completely overwhelmed.

Example:

#include "polyscope/polyscope.h"

// Generate a single warning.
// Has no effect on the GUI until polyscope gets control flow
// back, which happens here in the show() call below.
polyscope::warning("Something went slightly wrong");

// Generate a lot of warnings. Becase all of these warnings 
// have the same base message (the first string), they will 
// be batched together and only shown as one dialog. The detail 
// message for the first such warning will also be shown.
for (int i = 0; i < 5000; i++) {
  polyscope::warning("Some problems come in groups", 
    "detail = " + std::to_string(i));
}

// The previous warnings would be displayed here
polyscope::show();

void polyscope::error(std::string message)

error

Generate an error, which is immediately shown in the GUI. After the error dialog is dismissed in the GUI, this function returns.

void polyscope::terminatingError(std::string message)

terminating error

Generate an error, which is immediately shown in the GUI. After the error dialog is dismissed in the GUI, the program terminates.