$Id: cmt10.txt 1042 2004-09-13 18:59:40Z skaus $
Critical Error Handler Repeat Check Autofailer
	-- 2004-09-13 ska

Due to some heavy and annoying invocations of the Critical Error handler
by some operations the standard Critical Error handler has been extended
by a feature to automatically switch into autofail mode, in which all
requests are automatically returned by FAIL without displaying the
Critical Error user dialogue.

Currently this feature must be activated by FreeCOM before and deactivated
after the operation.

Current effected operations are:
+ the whole DIR command, and
+ the search for external commands through %PATH%.

The algorithm is as followed:
1. FreeCOM turns the CRITER repeat check ON.
2. The operation is performed.
3. FreeCOM turns the CRITER repeat check OFF and, if any, displays how many
Critical Error requests had been hidden.

The repeat check works like so:
+ If a Critical Error occurs, the handler checks, if the repeat check is
active; if not, the standard CRITER dialogue is displayed, nothing
special is happening.
+ If the repeat check is active, the handler verifies, if the current
request is originated by a block device, that had been FAILed or ABORTed
by the user earlier; if so and there occured less than 256 CRITERs til
then, the request is silently FAILed, no dialogue is displayed.
+ In all other cases, the standard dialogue is displayed and the user is
prompted for an action; if the action is either FAIL or ABORT, this
particular block device will autofail the next 255 requests.

=======================

There had been another suggestion by Eric Auer to autofail requests, if
they come in a short time.

In my opinion this idea is nice, if one can decide:
+ if the request is almost similiar as the last request, e.g. it would not
make sense to autofail a request from a character device or another block
device, when block device A: failed last time,
+ what when the reasons of the failings differ heavily,
+ how long is short.

The currently implemented solution will help at very context specific
operations, where it is less likely that many different CRITERs occure;
e.g. searching through %PATH% may result in problems accessing block drives,
is it really of any interest whether the find API call failed because of
trouble in FAT or data portion?
However, it would be useful to know, whether drives A: and C: fail,
would it not?

"DIR a:*.* >prn" may fail very often, because of out-of-paper
conditions, therefore it does not seem helpful to autofail requests for
character devices. Also, there is currently no operation that seems to
be heavily effected by ignoreable CRITERs for character devices.
