Why doesn't this error message... "Only ancestor queries are allowed inside a transaction."
...look something like this... "Only ancestor queries are allowed inside a transaction. Entity X is not an ancestor of Entity Y" ...or maybe... "Entities X and Y are not in an ancestor relationship." ...where X and Y are keys I can look up in the datastore? I can think of only three reasons: 1. Laziness 2. Internally GAE percolates only (int) error codes and not error details 3. The number of possible reasons for the error is so high and/or the logic so complex that the specific reason can't be determined at all, or can't be determined without significant performance degradation. It's obviously not 3, but any of the three is a reason for me to consider giving up on GAE. It's not that I can't figure it out -- oh, I will -- it's just a matter of how much time it's worth spending due to Google's laziness or poor design. Am I asking too much? Am I a moron for expecting details in error messages? Am I overlooking something obvious and making a complete fool of myself? If so, I'd be more than happy in my moronitude to be set straight. One thing I'm fairly sure of is that GAE's uptake would be much higher if Google invested in documentation. It's not that the GAE documentation is incorrect or incomplete or unclear -- from what I've seen anyway -- it's just extremely minimal. Surely they could reduce the learning curve by an order of magnitude with some diagrams and animations and better examples. GAE requires a whole different mindset, does it not? Couple the minimal documentation with the useless error messages and you get whiners like me. Yes, I've seen the sample apps and the (unorganized) cookbook and the youtube videos. Those are definitely helpful, but that's not what I'm talking about. The bottom line is that developers are smart enough to figure things out, but the competition for their attention is fierce, and when you waste their time, you lose. Mark my words: as the speed of technological innovation increases, platform/API uptake will be strongly correlated with the quality of the documentation it ships with. There literally won't be enough time to learn a poorly documented API before it's time to move on to the next. Bonus classic Win32 error message: The data is invalid. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
