The Message Window
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The message window is where GSEOS posts system message, certain error messages and general purpose messages. You can also post messages to the message window. However, log windows may be the more appropriate place to post user messages.

The following snapshot depicts the message window:

messagewindow

The message window can be flloating, pinned to a desktop page or hidden. Refer to the Desktop Management section for more information. A message window is associated with a file and all contents are written to the message file. The file will not be truncated and grow over time. You might want to purge it from time to time.

The file used is specified in the gseos.ini file in section [Message]. The entry FileName holds the current message file.

[Message]
FileName = gseos.msg

The message window organizes messages in rows. It logs the data and time, the source that generated the message, a message type (INFO, WARNING, or ERROR), an event ID, a count, and the message itself. If a message gets repeated the counter is incremented instead of adding the same message over and over. This is useful if a particular error condition generates the same error message on an ongoing basis. Instead of flooding the message window the counter for that message increments. However, this is only true if the new message is identical to the last, otherwise a new message will be added.

All messages that get written to the message window get routed through the system block Message.
Below is the definition of the Message block as defined in System.blk:

Message      {Type                ,,, 32;
              EventID             ,,, 32;
              Source[32]          ,,,  8;
              Text[1024]          ,,,  8}

You can intercept this block with a GSEOS Monitor or Decoder and perform the appropriate action.


Programmatic Access:
The Gseos module offers the method: Gseos.Message() which you can call to post your own messages to the message window. This is useful for short, infrequent messages like exceptions or errors you want to report. For more extensive logging a log window might be more appropriate.

It is also conceivable to directly generate a Message block from a Python script. For more information on how to generate GSEOS data blocks from Python scripts refer to the __main__ module.