Character mode Timer

Anybody using a Timer (in character mode) to display a message that then times out?

We're plagued by locks ATM and I [I][U][B]know[/B][/U][/I] it's users ignoring errors on screen.

User messages in a locked state? Tsk tsk. ;)

oops, thought I'd responded earlier. No, not user messages but system messages, printers going offline, licence lockups for instance. But I want to take general user messages out of the equation so that the ones I can't control stand out and demand attention. Maybe it's a network issue but we are having to restart more than once a day.

for now I'm just displaying the message and using a sleep before closing it. Doesn't have to be sophisticated.

error messages should not cause a system to be locked. A real error message should break a transaction and of course you should never show messageboxes during a transaction

same goes for printing of course.

What exactly are you thinking they are ignoring during a transaction?

We have added logs that log all our transactions, error messages etc

Also we added code specifically to messgaeboxes and similar to now allow them to be used during a transaction

I never mentioned or implied a transaction. :p

Solved it for now (the immediate problem, not the question).

We have code that stops this charmode program running multiple times, but before that code we have code to establish the machine's identity, and in between we have (or had) something that checks the machine is opened for the day. If the machine wasn't open it waited on the msgbox, but it didn't stop the user leaving that on screen, then going through the open process and starting the program again, this time successfully. The first iteration meanwhile had grabbed some system entries that the second iteration expected to be available so wouldn't let them in very far. The user moved to another till and started again.

Problem caused by unintelligent cut and paste in cranky old procedural code when refactoring. The PEBKAC being me in this case.

To resolve I created a PauseBox by making a msgbox display then sleep then quit. That replaced both those tests and we are now on the pig's back. Though I've an idea to apply the same logic to everything but yes/no boxes, even then we could default to yes or no after an interval.

I'm spending too much time on IT manager tasks right now and not enough on development, hence the series of dumb questions lately.