Roy, it looks promising.  I hope you don't mind if I mention a few more bugs (running in Win7 64-bit)--

1. Unexpected click sequences in the filter/query generator can raise an "access violation/read of address 0".  Here's one path to it:
Choose a field from the list
Click on a column header e.g. "Test"
Click on the "Test" entry area (available choices will not pop up)
Click on a column header or a different entry area--access violation

2. User can bypass a required "Test" entry, leading to List index out of bounds:
Select a field such as "Main Market"
Skip the "Test", go directly to "Criteria" (criteria list will be lacking its checkboxes)
Select an item from Criteria list
Click "Filter Table"--list error

3. Unmatched parentheses raises an unhandled EDB exception which will terrify end users.

Charles Tyson

Charles


Mind - its exactly what I was hoping for!

Better still would have been "I've hammered it mercilessly but can't find any bugs" <vbg>

I will now track these down and squash them.

Roy Lambert

Charles


>1. Unexpected click sequences in the filter/query generator can raise an "access violation/read of address 0". Here's one path to it:
>Choose a field from the list
>Click on a column header e.g. "Test"
>Click on the "Test" entry area (available choices will not pop up)
>Click on a column header or a different entry area--access violation

Squished - I think

>2. User can bypass a required "Test" entry, leading to List index out of bounds:
>Select a field such as "Main Market"
>Skip the "Test", go directly to "Criteria" (criteria list will be lacking its checkboxes)
>Select an item from Criteria list
>Click "Filter Table"--list error

You can no longer enter the criteria is there is no test and well as if there is no field

>3. Unmatched parentheses raises an unhandled EDB exception which will terrify end users.

That one would is easy to fix, I can simply count the number of brackets of each type and issue a warning.

However, without serious parsing (and my intention was not to replace Tim's parser) I can't do the same for the Link (AND / OR) nor for the fact that users can click to set the filter / query at any point no matter how well formed it is. My thoughts were errors of that nature should be handled in the app (ie wrap a try except round the filter setting / query execution).

What I could do is try preparing a query with the output from the generator and if that delivers an error pass that back. IE it will be handled but won't be much better in terms of terrifying the user with a nasty error message

Roy

Charles et al

>3. Unmatched parentheses raises an unhandled EDB exception which will terrify end users.

I've been looking at this and other syntax type errors and I can't see much else I can do apart from allow the EDB Exception to be shown. The problem is that this is really external to the filter / query generator. These can only be tested when the getfilter/getsql functions are called once that's done the generator can either return a string or not (ie emptystring) so its down to the developer in the app.

I can petition Tim for some less scary error messages or trap them and substitute my own bland ones or leave as is so that those pesky users will get scared and learn to do it right

What do others do?

Roy