Answers to: Official MAC Designer Beta experience

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Tue, 12 May 2020 09:40:19 -0400

also, sometimes when selecting a data class in the dialog, it's not correctly set in the dataclass definition. repeating the procedure (opening the dialog by using the pointer and press the C-Icon, searching and selecting the desired type by double-clicking it) helps. I hear from windows users, that they have the same issues.

Answer by peterw81

peterw81 — Tue, 12 May 2020 08:33:48 -0400

hi there

Thanks 8.0.5 is pretty stable and a huge improvement. There is one little thing I really miss a lot: when editing a data class, pressing tab would also go focus on the open select datatype dialog. Now it leaves the little C-Icon out. When I press tab takes the focus out of the line. It would be very very convenient if I could press tab to focus on the open dialog and then by pressing space the dialog opens. Then I would not need to use the pointer to open the dialog.

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Fri, 08 May 2020 05:04:40 -0400

good new for Apple users: Axon.ivy Designer.app 8.0.5 is available https://dev.axonivy.com/download

Enjoy @peterw81

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Thu, 07 May 2020 13:03:57 -0400

sorry, didn't have time to play. also, if it's not 8.0 compliant, then the risk is too high for me to use it. I'd rather wait for 8.0.5.

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Thu, 07 May 2020 03:05:28 -0400

Hey @peterw81 We've just fixed the 'thread blocking' issue that arose when using the menu 'jump to referenced process'.

If you want to play with the improved designer you can get it here: https://dev.axonivy.com/permalink/nightly/axonivy-designer-macosx-beta.zip But be aware that this is the leading edge version - already containing 9.1 features which may not comply with 8.0. It would be interesting for us if there are any blocking issues left....

At any rate, 8.0.5 can be expected in a few days and will also contain the fix :-)

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Tue, 05 May 2020 05:44:25 -0400

Hi there, many thanks for the hint with pressing J, i'll try to do that and keep you posted. Glad you can now reproduce the issue! Hopefully this can be fixed soon-isch.

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Tue, 05 May 2020 05:36:48 -0400

Thanks a lot @peterw81 The hint with using the 'jumping to referenced process' action was very helpful. I could reproduce this when using the menu on a process activity and reported the issue: XIVY-4055 AWT Thread blocked when jumping to referenced process on Mac Since the recorded stack exposes a very generic locking issue when dealing with Fonts in the ProcessEditor stack I could imagine that also other 'freeze' scenarios come back to the same issue. So we will definitively have a look at this. One note; I faced the issue less when using key action (press J when hovering an activity)

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Mon, 04 May 2020 12:28:56 -0400

As for the browser: it's not the internal browser that can't connect, it's my external Chrome that can't open the site anymore. I don't use the internal browser at all. Also sometimes values set in an inscribe dialog are not being saved. This means I always have to double check if it stored my code and/or values. This takes a lot of time, since Designer is generally speaking not very responsive. Frustration levels rise when you push a button and it takes several moments (seconds) until something happens.

I hear from windows users issues along the same lines.

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Mon, 04 May 2020 12:28:49 -0400

Hi there,

I'll see what I can do about the thread dump and video for the simulation speed. Frankly, there is another issue that is really frustrating me. Intermittently "Jump to referenced process" is crashing Designer. This is really really bad, since I use it very frequently. Again, it keeps just hanging and no log entries. All there is left to do is killing the OS process and restarting it (which is again a time-consuming matter)

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 02:45:14 -0400

You can create Thread Dumps most conveniently using VisualVM. Install and open it:

select the JavaVM to analyze (Designer)
go to the 'Threads' tab
hit the 'Thread dump' button (repeat this 3 times ... with a few seconds pause in between)
share the created .tdump files with us: we may can see a locking issue in it.

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 02:41:30 -0400

Hi @peterw81

I hope you are still valiantly working with the Mac Designer.app. Thanks to your effort we have a bunch of issues solved on 8.0.5. 😍

However the 'Browser' and 'Inscribe' bug still bothers us. For the browser we have meanwhile other customers facing similar issues on different platforms - maybe they can provide data on the cause. But for both bugs recording 'thread dumps' could be the solution. Very likely an EVENT thread (e.g. AWT) is blocked. Can you record a thread dump using visualvm when you face one of the issues next time? https://visualvm.github.io/

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 04:12:58 -0400

browser can you test whether your real browser (not in the designer) could still access the embedded engine when it is blocked in the Designer?

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 04:11:37 -0400

inscribe can you confirm that you looked into the 'error log' view and /logs/ivy.log file and no evidence is available why the process is blocked from adding inscriptions? I do have a lot of false positives in the error log ... but never no errors. So I think there must be an evidence for the freeze. It's almost impossible without any logs to tackle the issue as I can't reproduce it here. Does it may only happen after some specific element has been inscribed?

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 04:03:44 -0400

animation speed can you record a video of it? I only have a MacMini to test and I access it via VNC ... so animation is always kind of slow (but I always blamed the remote desktop for it).

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 14:47:57 -0400

Hi there again another observation is that simulating a process (even in fastest setting) is quite lame. this takes unnecessary time. perhaps the speed of the simulation can be raised?

another point: sometimes, I have the feeling, after you abort a running process by hitting the red stop button in the top bar, the designer engine is gone. in my browser window I get a site can't be reached, connection refused. again, restart is the only thing that helps.

many thanks, p

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 11:54:11 -0400

speaking of the devil "not being able to inscribe", it happened. No, also in the outline view, I am not able to open the inscribe dialog. no log entries...

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 11:32:28 -0400

Hi Reguel Thanks very much! Apparently when you remove the following line from the Axon.Ivy Designer.ini -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts at least the project explorer font size get's bigger. The only one I was not able to set via preferences. Still the process designer is very small, so the issue remains even having removed the above line. in regards to inscribe: I'll let you know, when I run into that issue again. I didn't yet today, but I did quite regularly restart Designer today.

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 11:11:02 -0400

grey editor : see first post ... zooming in and out should help
can't inscribe : if you are in this state, can you still open inscription with the 'outline view'? by double clicking on elements? do you see any errors in the 'error log' or logs in the /logs/ivy.log file related to that problem?
element size : just tested and I agree that the scaling isn't matching the expectations and also that setting the 'Dialog Font' size doesn't make any difference > opened an issue internally known as XIVY-3956 Process Editor default zoom way too small on MAC

Answer by peterw81

peterw81 — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 09:39:54 -0400

hi there here are some more observations I made:

Process Designer stays grey sometimes when opening a process or subprocess the windows just stays grey. see image below:
can't inscribe to some process elements sometimes I just can't open the inscribe dialog window, only after restart of designer it works again.
preferences window doesn't show all list elements, resizing the window helps.
size of process elements in regards to the zoom and size of the process elements: I changed all font sizes to at least 13, but still the process elements are really small. this didn't seem to make any difference. it doesn't seem to be relative to the font size.

these are not so important issues, yet they can be annoying. perhaps at some point they could be addressed.

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 11:00:32 -0400

brilliant, thanks for the good news.

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 10:47:42 -0400

Thanks for testing @peterw81

Meanwhile we have are stabilizing a real fix for 8.0.5 so in about four weeks these log issues will be gone without manual hacking. From then on I'd recommend to remove the ~/xpertivy/log4jconfig.xml and stick to the standard impl.

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 04:47:50 -0400

hi there again. thanks for the workaround. yes, I now can see the eclipse/logs/ivy.log being written to. Also adding a ivy.log.setLevel(Level.ALL); helps seeing the runtime log.

I changed the log4jconfig.xml <root> <level value="ALL"/> <appender-ref ref="FileLog"/> <appender-ref ref="ConsoleAppender"/> </root>

Now I get runtime log entries as expected.

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 03:30:52 -0400

You are welcome @peterw81 We just published a work-around for the logging issue here: https://answers.axonivy.com/questions/4418/where-to-find-engine-logs-using-the-mac-designer Please verify that it work for you and leave a comment either way on your experience.

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 12:29:08 -0400

That'd be much appreciated, thanks very much for your efforts and continuous help!

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 09:22:46 -0400

I agree that this is really a big issue. So I'll enforce it to be done by the third-level support - so that at least a hotfix can be provided to make it work. An 8.0.5 with the final fix is currently planned to be released in a month.

Comment by peterw81 on peterw81's answer

peterw81 — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 10:18:49 -0400

thanks very much reguel for this infos. what is your gut-feeling about when this runtime log issue will be resolved. shortcuts, zoom and all the other stuff I could live with, but no runtime log is a huge problem. showstopper if you will, which means back to windows .-(

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 10:15:51 -0400

shortcuts: are a known issue with the process editor, not only on mac. our long term plan is to rebuild a sexy process editor - so we do not want to investigate.
code tab: also saw this from time to time. usually resizing the window helps. but we are working on a proper ui testing environment for mac - so that we can address these issues seriously and discover broken ui parts automatically. But this will take some time since this is not our topmost priority.

Comment by Reguel Wermelinger on peterw81's answer

Reguel Wermelinger — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 10:14:14 -0400

logging: known issue unfortunately not yet prioritized to be fixed in the next sprint. Internal this bug is known as: XIVY-3526 Fix Runtimelog for Mac Designer
zoom: in process can not be pre-defined. Yet it is dynamic: calculated relative to the text editor font. So if you play with the font in Preferences > General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts > Basic > Text Font you should be able to change the font size ... and therefore also the process editor zoom on next re-open. (may requires a restart)

Answer by peterw81

peterw81 — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 08:38:18 -0400

having started to work with it now there are two details that I observed:

shortcuts for opening resources and types

(on windows CTRL-SHIFT-T and CTRL-SHIFT-R) are not working when the focus is in a process map. the shortcut only works when the focus is in the process explorer (COMMAND instead of CTRL of course). also at times no shortcuts at all work (e.g. undo !, then all that works is selected from the menu, which is annoying)

default for zoom

also the I didn't find a way to set a default for the zoom on a process map, which means I always have to zoom twice when opening any sort of process.

code tab

sometimes the code tab (or output tab) is shown without text, see image below:

logging

unfortunately I can't find the designer logs. I checked the log4j config file located in ../Contents/Eclipse/configuration/log4jconfig.xml

user.dir=/Applications/Axon.ivy Designer.app/Contents/MacOS

but there is no log. I double the write permissions on the directory, which should be okay. Also I tried to place a fixed path to the log directory. no luck. how is anyone else getting on with the logging? console (runtime) log is hence also not working.

Answer by peterw81

peterw81 — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 05:22:15 -0400

I have now installed everything on the host OS and I am excited, it's brilliant! really fast, memory settings are working as expected, more instances of Designer on problem at all. Thanks for your help and thoughts!!