eConnect WCF exception handling

For this example a WCF service reference to the server endpoint running the GP2010 eConnect integration service as a reference named “GPeConnect” is used.

If an exception were to occur from eConnect on say the CreateEnity mehods, and the exception examined as type system.exception, then the following message is found from ex.message,

System.ServiceModel.FaultException: The creator of this fault did not specify a Reason

To retrieve the error message from econnect that we are interested in, use the System.ServiceModel.FaultException class as shown below. By accessing the Detail.Message property, it is possible to get message of interest.

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Today I was helping a college get USB detection working on a WPF application. He was using a library I wrote for another windows forms application and was trying to use it in a WPF application.

The problem is that my library overrode the WndProc method of the main application form in order to capture and route the windows messages through to the library.

WPF does not natively have the WndProc as it uses a different messaging architecture, however an interop has been provided details of which can be found in "WPF and Win32 Interoperation Overview" and more "WPF-Win32 Interop Part 2: Hosting Win32 Controls (ListBox) in WPF Windows"

I’ve mentally bookmarked this subject to come back to as it looks like it gets involved but essentially if you want to detect the removal of a USB device in a WPF application you can do it by using the example I outline in this page. The example is a get you started and I would read around the subject before using this in production code.

Read all about U.B. Funkey USB Detection Example VB.NET & WPF

Technologies used

Windows Communications Framework (WCF), VB.NET windows forms, SQL server, Oracle, Pindar Catalogue Management System (CMS)

Background:

Pindar produce a Catalogue Management System (CMS), that is used by many large catalogue companies to manage, traditionally printed catalogues. Companies such as the large electronic components catalogues and clothes directories.

From a technical perspective, CMS is an Oracle database that holds all the items, prices, page content, layout, pictures, paragraphs, sections, pages, publications and other resources linked to those entities. It handles work flow of the activities that are required to generate catalogue content with authorisation and release concepts, handles multi-lingual translations and the workflow involved in getting that content translated. As you can tell this is an expensive and powerful publication system for the larger catalogue companies.

The Oracle database if fronted by a number of optional components, the most important to us are the CMS manager this is the forms front end to the system and the Quark extensions that allow the pages to be built in Quark and ultimately sent to the printers in postscript files. Essentially the Quark extensions allow the Quark to understand and build the pages from all the elements held in the database, very cool to see. Oh and it works on both Mac and PC, obviously with the publishing heritage.

Delphi

Many years ago I wrote an application in Delphi in my own time that took content exported from CMS tables into excel and then built HTML pages using this information. It read the page layouts and essentially built the page in HMTL in a similar same way that the Quark extension does it in Quark (all be it the subsection of functions that we utilised). One of the major problems was handling the Quark and Stibo (previous catalogue management system) tags that littered the text returned from CMS.
Things turned direction and I never actually used this application and the folder got stuffed on my shelf for another time.

Requirement

Getting the text of the catalogue onto our web pages as text rather than PDFs suddenly went to the top of the list when we bought our Google Mini, and the need to feed it with rich content came along. I dusted down the Delphi project stripped out the bits I needed and started on a adventure to build an application that would allow the publication of item groups from CMS to our internet site. This was also was the prefect project to add to my experience of WCF.

The application had to allow the CMS user to see which item group texts had been updated since they were last published to the web and preview those groups then publishing the new version to the internet.

Follow how I used MD5 check sums and last modified dates, and schema validations to ensure the content had changed and was valid by following the project.

Publishing Catalogue Management System to ASPNET