#9 Improve error handling and reporting

[Mirko Raner]

Right now, the error handling in escripts is haphazard at best. There are plenty of automatically generated catch blocks that just call printStackTrace(), and errors are always reported to the console, if at all. Depending on where exactly an error or exception occurred the executed script might recover - or it might not.

There should be a uniform and clearly defined way to handle and report errors. There also should be a recovery policy that determines whether a script is resumed or aborted after an error was encountered.

Also, when launching scripts from within a running workbench, errors probably should be reported in a different fashion that simply sending a stack trace to the console of the hosting Eclipse instance. For example, the script might allocate its own console (in Eclipse's Console View) or report the error in a dialog box.

[Mirko Raner]

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Ideally, the error reporting should go beyond merely reporting exceptions. For example, an error message should also be issued if a <click button="..."> element is executed and the corresponding button happens to be currently disabled. When something like this happens in a wizard dialog the dialog's current error message could be extracted and reported. This would provide developers with an easier way of troubleshooting a script.