Misleading, inconsistent missing variable errors on activities

Studio inconsistently displays, or doesn’t display, the exclamation/warning red and yellow messages at its will when there is being used a variable name that is not set. Exemple:

Look at these two screenshots. I cut and pasted these two activities from another part of the project. I knew it was using a variable name that didn’t exist in that context, but no warning was being shown. When I double clicked on the “Parameters” or the “Expression editors”, the warnings where shown up.


Then, I cut and pasted those same activities in a different area of the workflow. And look:

Immediately the exclamations and warnings popped out.

This behaviour is misleading, prone to errors, confusing, annoying and not up to a paid software that costs a fortune.

I don’t understand what you mean.

The contents of the activities are exactly the same in both screenshots; I already explained. Sometimes, randomly, Studio detects it properly in the “general view” of the workflow; other times you have to double click and go further in the activity, as I explained, to realize there’s an error because Studio is not displaying it properly.

I think there is an overall issue with the 23.x versions of Studio where the validation process that happens behind the scenes whenever you make a change sometimes takes a LONG time, or is just freezing altogether. I frequently have times where there is a legitimate warning/error icon on the activity, I fix the issue, and the icon doesn’t go away for quite a while - or doesn’t go away at all until I run/debug/validate the project.

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There are also issues with the validations sometimes being wrong in the popups, I have experienced quite a few times when the expression editor is claiming an error, but there isn’t one and the code happily compiles. The WorkFlow Analyzer adds an extra layer of annoyance as it often declare my code invalid but is just hallucinating as I can happily publish the same code via command line or sometimes by closing the project and re-opening to reset whatever it is complaining about, I’ve requested the option to overrule the analyzer and tell it to shut up, but I doubt that will get much traction any time soon.

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I like your style, @Jon_Smith :grin: