Messages

Each WXP program will produce various types of textual output. The bulk of this is informative in terms of menus, prompts and messages describing the processing of data and what is going on behind the scenes. The output is then prioritized by message level. The major levels are as follows:

• none - this turns off ALL printing and in not recommended unless you are running the program in a batch mode or from within a shell script. This will turn off printing of prompts and errors messages.
• print - this is REQUIRED output in the program and is relegated to prompts and menus that must be printed for the proper working of programs.
• error - these are program ending error messages. If an error occurs that forces the program to terminate, it will print out an error message.
• warn - these are messages that often indicate a problem in the program but do not force the program to terminate.
• mess - these are general messages which are often descriptive. These include a printout of the program name and version level and descriptions of what the program is doing as in reading databases, fitting data to a grid.
• out1 - out4 - various types of general output from the program. If the program performs calculations, these will be printed out at these levels. Levels out1 and out2 are printed by default and these represent output that is most commonly displayed. Levels out3 and out4 contain extraneous data that you may still want to look at but would overclutter the display if were printed by default.
• debug1 - debug8 - these are debug messages that are often left in WXP programs to trace down any possible bugs in the program. This will produce large amounts of output.

Each program will list what is printed under each level in the Program Reference.

Setting the message resource

By using the message resource, you can selectively turn on and off various types of output. The first form just specifies a message level:

   -me=out1

This will enable the level out1 (and all of its sublevels) plus all levels of higher priority (including print, error, warn, mess).

WXP also allows you to selectively turn levels on and off:

   -me=+out3,+out4

This will still default to out2 so all higher priority levels will be included but you will also print out all messages with either out3 or out4 priorities. To print just those levels, you need to turn off all printing first:

   -me=none,+out3,+out4

This way you can be highly selective.

Last updated June 13, 2020