Automatically roll back when a significant error occurs

neobobkrause

I have a document that contains a vertical part that I wanted to better understand the horizonal profile slices of. So I extruded a pattern of horizonal slice parts just 1mm thick and other mm apart from each other - over a thousand of them - that I then tried to boolean/remove from my vertical part. Well a boolean that complex turns out to be more than OnShape could handle. So after waiting about 5 minutes for this boolean to complete, I got an error message saying something serious had gone wrong and to contact tech support with a unique support code.

Leaving my part studio in this broken state over the weekend until a support engineer could reset the document put my development on hold for several days - unnecessarily.

My recommendation is that OnShape respond to this serior error condition by automatically rolling back the studio’s feature list to the very beginning. If it had done that for me this weekend then I would have had the chance to delete (or fix) the boolean operation so that I could continue my work without having to wait for tech support to respond to my problem report days later.

- Bob

NeilCooke

Hi @neobobkrause - sorry for the problems you experienced. I think most systems would struggle subtracting 1000 parts - if you had connected the 1000 parts so that they were 1 (e.g. place a vertical extrude through all of them) then the boolean would probably have worked (EDIT: although I probably wouldn't recommend this either - using the section tool would be best) 

If the feature had failed I'm not sure how it could have locked up your document? Anyway, for future reference, from the documents page you can click on your document, then go to the versions and history (in the details panel) and restore to a previous state there.

neobobkrause

I think the point is that sometimes what we’re trying to accomplish beyond the system’s capabilities so that an operation can’t be completed. I heard back from Techical Support this morning saying that my document had been rolled back to the first feature of the studio. I think we can all agree that there’s no downside to OnShape doing this Roll To Here operation automatically whenever it encounters an operation that it’s unable to complete rather than forcing the user to report a problem and wait for a support engineer to find the time to do this rollback manually. We can also agree that this rolling back is far superior to forcing the user to abandon everything they’ve done since the last check-in.

- Bob

paul_chastell

There is no check-in in Onshape, nor do you have to restore to a Version. From the version list on the documents page you can restore to the state immediately preceding the change that caused the problem, i.e. in your case you could restore to just before the boolean was added, and nothing else is lost, which is effectively the same as doing an undo after making a failing feature. Not all serious errors can be fixed by rolling back and that is unlikely to be our solution for this example, rather we would expect that Onshape fails in a way that doesn't require a restore, but instead displays a feature with an error.

neobobkrause

I think there’s some confusion about the user experience that I’m referring to. Once I added this very large boolean operation, I was left in the rotating circle state indicating that the cloud was still working on rendering the feature list. My window stayed in this unresponsive state for about 5 minutes, until an error message appears saying that a significant error had occurred so that OnShape could not complete the operation ** From this point on this studio window was “bricked” and remained bricked even if I reloaded the webpage, or signed out of OnShape and then signed back in again. ** The error message said that I needed to open a support ticket having a GUID value so that the engineer could roll back the feature list to the beginning.

So no, this is not just a case of a feature being shown in red lettering indicating it had failed. The window’s OnShape toolbar wouldn’t even draw. The OnShape window was bricked.

lougallo

@neobobkrause we see this often enough and yes it could be done. The bigger issue is that the document must be timed out before the rollback can be done. It might do something even better like suppressing the last feature so you can delete it and move forward. We have talked about these cases and the better experience when this state is hit. 

owen_sparks

neobobkrause said:

I think there’s some confusion about the user experience that I’m referring to. Once I added this very large boolean operation, I was left in the rotating circle state indicating that the cloud was still working on rendering the feature list. My window stayed in this unresponsive state for about 5 minutes, until an error message appears saying that a significant error had occurred so that OnShape could not complete the operation ** From this point on this studio window was “bricked” and remained bricked even if I reloaded the webpage, or signed out of OnShape and then signed back in again. ** The error message said that I needed to open a support ticket having a GUID value so that the engineer could roll back the feature list to the beginning.

So no, this is not just a case of a feature being shown in red lettering indicating it had failed. The window’s OnShape toolbar wouldn’t even draw. The OnShape window was bricked.

Hi.

If you can't get into the document directly then there is another way via a recent update.  If you navigate to your "my onshape" page the revision history has been added to the right hand pane.  From here you can open the doc at any of the previous revisions or feature addition points.

Like so:-

Cheers, Owen S.

NeilCooke

Thanks @owen_sparks I agree that is the best solution. 

neobobkrause

If you can't get into the document directly then there is another way via a recent update.  If you navigate to your "my onshape" page the revision history has been added to the right hand pane.  From here you can open the doc at any of the previous revisions or feature addition points.

Like so:-

Cheers, Owen S.

Good one Owen. I’ll do that next time. But I still believe that the OnShape engine should respond to this bricked condition by rolling to the start of the document’s feature list.

thanks,

- Bob

mike_richards905

thanks for the information