I ran a lot of script code for several files and waited for the script error icon to show up.
After some testing I found out, it will not show while the script console is open.
I'd like to suggest to always show the error indicator, regardless of whether the console is visible or not.
This has multiple reasons:
Another thing is, if you have a lot of script output for the current task, you cannot tell if there happened something bad, unless you scroll all the script output back to the beginning. The beginning though, might not be in the buffer anymore. Increasing the buffer to "really huge" on the other hand, slows down DO very much, so I keep away from that. The result is, that even though the console is open, you still have no error to look at and no indicator either.
If there are multiple listers, errors will not show in any of them if only one of the listers has the console open.
Murphys Law tells, you always got the error in that lister, where the console is not currently visible. o)
So you have no clue that some script related things failed in this case as well.
The purpose of the icon is to tell you you need to open the script output panel to see something important. The icon is hidden as soon as the panel is opened.
If the icon appeared even if the panel was open, when would the icon be hidden?
What's the script doing that it needs to output so much to the log window that things are easily missed?
Errors are an event that happens at a point in time. Once they happen, they are in the past. There is no longer an error at the present moment, but there will always have been an error in the past.
The icon exists to tell you there is an error that you haven't seen yet because you don't have the log open, and to provide a quick way to open the log.
It's for scripted columns mostly. The use case is like: "Let the scripted column generate data for all the items there are." Its not unlikely that the script is going to fail on one of many items. A trace-like output is quite helpful to determine what item caused the error in what situation - but as mentioned - you always need to review all of the output because the error icon will not light up if something weird happened.
I see and I agree, one needs to think about something sensible to determine when the icon shall disappear. To not over complicate things, two simple solutions come to my mind.
Clear the icon when clicking on it (if console not visible, open it (as now), if it's already open, just clear icon).
Clear the icon whenever the console opens or closes.
Maybe combine 1 and 2. o)
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@wowbagger
The situation "When there is no error" as you suggest, is not so easy to determine I guess. o) This would only work in conjunction with an errorfree timespan or something, but that probably only adds unnecessary complexity here.
If you have two windows open, and only one is showing the panel. It would be handy to see the icon in the other window.
Flash the icon a couple of times when the error occurs regardless of if the panel is visible?