I have a form to create new topics much like the feature request form. I noticed if users didn't use a proper WikiWord for the topic name it'd return a message with a warning:

"NOTE: This Wiki topic does not exist WARNING: It is not recommended to use this topic name, because it will not be linked automatically. See LinkWord for details."

The warning also contained helpful hints like "If you used the "Go" feature to jump to this page:" which were irrelevant to my situation because I don't have a "Go feature" at all. In my hunt for this error message I discovered it was a topic in the admin web not an oops template as I had first suspected.

I'm wondering why there is this inconsistency? Some errors are oops templates, some oops templates are not errors (oopsmore), some errors are topics.

How about making ALL errors and other messages into topics?

How about a list of codes for all errors and other messages. In the Site Preferences topic you jave a list where you specify a topic to display for each code.

e.g. Set Error:NonWikiNameError = Admin.NonWikiNameError

Site Preferences will already come complete with all the defaults

In the core twiki code you could have a list of defined error codes, when an error is raised the code is passed to a generic handler which simply calls view\[message topic] as defined in the site preferences.

Benefits:

• increases consistency
• would make it MUCH easier to maintain the twiki site
• means you don't have to hardcode topic names in the core code (which is naughty).
• would reduce the number of templates significantly (I don't believe an error message should be considered a template anyway).

Anyway, anyone else have any thoughts on this?

-- AndrewTetlaw - 21 Jan 2002

Sounds good. Means that language changes would be easier to implement as well.

-- MartinCleaver - 21 Jan 2002