EscribalGuide
Reading what a run tells you
Amber for what was skipped, red for what stopped the run, each on the exact instruction.
When a run ends, the status box at the bottom of the right-hand panel says what happened. It is a headline and a list: the headline is the outcome (the files that were written, or the error that stopped everything) and under it goes one line for each thing the run remarked on the way.
While it runs
The top bar shows which step the run is on. A second run cannot start on top of it, and Stop ends the one that is going. Stopping is not a failure: nothing is written until the end, so nothing is left half done.
If any instruction reads from a database, this is the moment the connection details are asked for.
Two colours
- Amber: something was skipped. The run carried on, but one instruction could not do what it was asked: a sheet name the file does not have, a style the document never defines, an average over values that were not numbers. This is the one worth reading, because the workflow still ends in green and the document still gets written, with a piece of it missing.
- Red: the step that stopped the run. There is at most one, and it is also the headline. When a run stops this way no file is written at all, not even the part that had already been built.
The same colours on the canvas
The two colours land on the canvas too, on the dot and the number of the step they belong to, so you can go from a message to the line it is talking about. A loop or a condition gets a dot in its corner when what the run said happened inside it.
The marks stay while you fix things. They go when the next run starts, or when another file is opened.
The usual causes
- A sheet name the file does not have. Spreadsheet instructions arrive with
Sheet1filled in; a spreadsheet made in Spanish calls itHoja1. The instruction does nothing and says so, listing the sheets the file really has. - A field the record does not have. A renamed column in this month’s export. The message lists the fields the record does have.
- A number written with a comma.
4,5is not read as a number; write4.5. - A document with no name or no folder. Both are needed to save it, and the workflow stops at the save and says so.