Thanks, Daniel pointed it out yesterday.  What I was 
getting at is that it has very low affordance in the 
TOC or index of the manual.  It's easy to not realise 
that the facility exists at all.  In order to search for
something like this you need to know (a) that it exists
and (b) what it's called.

At the moment I'm trying to learn enough about SAP-DB to
make a richly informed decision about its capabilities
(i.e. should we consider supporting it and pitching it as 
an option to customers and if so, what can and can't it 
do?).  I don't really know the feature set in detail yet.

In this situation, the documentation, google searching on
the web and asking questions on the list are the main
resources.  Typically I would look in the TOC and index
of documentation to find likely candidates if I'm looking
for a feature.

The reference manual doesn't have an index as such, and the
TOC doesn't mention TRY/CATCH at all.  Thus its affordance
(i.e. the degree to which it is obvious that the feature
exists) is pretty low.  I didn't realise that it existed 
(and by extension didn't go googling for try/catch).

My suggestion is to add an index to the reference manual.
Another possibility would be to write up a whole bunch of
code samples and greatly expand the cookbook on the wiki.
I'd be quite interested to see C/ODBC usage examples, for
instance.

That's really a minor niggle.  I've been quite impressed
with SAP-DB.  

My only real wish-list feature is to support XA transactions 
or at least some ability to move a transaction context amongst connections
in a connection pool.  IMO, this is really a must-
have feature for 3-tier apps (if sap-db already has functionality
like this I'd be very keen to know but the wiki seems to imply
that it doesn't).  Maybe one for SAP-DB 8.0?


Nigel.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Binner, Silja [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Thursday, 13 March 2003 2:03 a.m.
> To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
> Subject: TRY/CATCH and documentation TOC
> 
> 
>       Hi Nigel
> 
>       sorry for not answering earlier. You can find 
> information about TRY/CATCH in the Reference Manual. The 
> easiest way to find the statements using TRY and CATCH is to 
> use the search function on www.sapdb.org. Since this search 
> function (based on Google) is a powerful tool, we decided not 
> to create separate indexes for the documentation.
> 
>       Best regards
>       SAP DB Documentation Team
> 
>       ----
>       Nigel wrote:
> 
>       TRY/CATCH doesn't get a mention in the TOC of the ref
>       manual as far as I can tell.  This means that it is not
>       obvious that this facility exists at all.  It's quite
>       easy to miss.  I missed it.  I've had this problem with
>       the SAP-DB docs - the TOC/index miss stuff.  I think
>       a better index would significantly improve the manuals.
> 
>       Nigel.
> 
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