Occasional Failure of Services command

[mpm]

I make extensive use the Take Rich Note command from the Services menu.

Perhaps 10-20% of the time, instead of the expected feedback in the Dock for a new note, I hear the System alert sound and nothing gets created in DT. For a time, I thought this was related to those instances where it took me too long to craft a new title and find a home in the HUD hierarchy. I thought maybe there was an AppleEvent timeout. But there have been instances where it failed even when I worked quickly, plus cases where I took a very long time to get to the OK button and it still successfully created the item in DT.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it a Services bug that I have to live with?

[Johannes]

This sounds like an issue I’m observing for a while and filed it as bug report. But unfortunately Christian is not (yet) able to reproduce this. I suggest you file a bug report as well with as much details as possible (see if there is any output in Console if this happens).

Here is what I have observed and reported:

I am not yet sure, whether I’ve tracked it down. I observe it since pb8, but it happens only sometimes.
Here is what I do:

I work in an other App, select some text and use the service Take Plain Text note (Neues Text-Memo in German) via shortcut (Take Ritch Text has the same issue).
According to my preferences the group selector HUD comes up and the Dock icon jumps. I select a group, tab to the tag field enter a tag, hit return to finish the tag, hit return to save the note (using the mouse has the same result).

Sometimes when I do this the group selector HUD closes, Dock Icon stops jumping and nothing happens. The text is nowhere, no badge comes up indicating that something has been imported.
It seems that this happens only on the first usage after DTP (or the database) has been launched. Any subsequent attempt to reproduce the behavior fails and everything works as expected.
It also seems that the issue is related to entering a tag in the group HUD. If no tag is entered this does not happen.

Johannes

[mpm]

I will file a bug report as you suggest.

FWIW, I know that this was happening in previous versions prior to the introduction of tags.

[Bill_DeVille]

I can’t reproduce the issue noted above.

But I have sometimes had a similar issue. When using the option in the HUD to create a new group into which the content is to be stored, the group will be created, the HUD closes and the Dock icon stops bouncing, but the save failed. A second attempt works.

This has been infrequent. To the best of my recollection, it occurs the first time a new group is created via the HUD, after a launch of DTPO2.

[Johannes]

I think I nailed it down: it is a timing issue. If the hud is open longer than about 30 seconds it fails. I stopped it hitting the service command and simply waiting without doing anything in the HUD. Otherwise it will work as expected. This explains why first usage or tag insertions or creating a new group tend to fail more often as those might take longer.

Johannes