Andreas Jakl's Forum Nokia Blog

As an Assistant Professor, I'm teaching Symbian OS at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria. My company "Mopius" is developing mobile software with a special focus on Symbian OS.

Everyone who has spent at least a few hours developing in C++ for Symbian OS will know about Symbian OS system error and panic codes. No doubt one of the most “famous” is the KERN-EXEC 3 (null pointer exception). But what if you encounter an E32USER-CBase 71? What is the error -5? Nobody can know all the codes by heart, so you have to look them up:

1. The new PanicLookup-Plug-in allows comfortably searching panic and system error codes.

   Of course, the panics are documented in the SDK-doc. But accessing it means going through the start menu to open the SDK doc and then navigating through a huge hierarchy of the index to get to the list: Symbian OS v9.x -> Symbian OS reference -> System panic reference -> KERN-EXEC -> ... go through a long list to find your code... The search function will list the codes as well, but somewhere hidden in lots of results. Error codes are even more difficult to find.
   
   
2. The famous NewLC Symbian OS Error Codes-list. This has been one of my favourite pages since I started Symbian OS development. A very comprehensive list, containing almost all codes.
   However, you have to start the browser, fire up the bookmark or search in Google for something like “Symbian error codes” and then search the error on the page. Additionally, it does not list the panic codes.
   
   
3. Similar lists are of course available at the Forum Nokia Wiki. But it has the same restrictions as the previous list, requiring you to fire up the browser and get to the relevant page somehow.
   
   
4. Some Excel-spreadsheets are floating around the web from time to time. They’re nice, but who really wants to fire up Excel just for looking up an error? Again, no panic codes included.
   
   
5. There’s a Python-tool that allows easily looking up the error codes on the command line. But you have to remember it, fire up the command prompt and enter some command to fire up the tool (which you have to remember, again). Again, only error codes and no panics.
   

Unless you are a perfect developer with centuries of experience, you will regularly experience errors codes. Therefore, the idea is obvious – an integrated error and panic code lookup tool for the Carbide.c++ IDE would be a considerable timesaver.

PanicLookup-Plug-in

Wolfgang Damm and Andreas Pum, two “Mobile Computing”-students from the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, have just finished a plug-in for Carbide.c++, which allows fast and efficient lookup of error codes.

Quite some time was spent on optimizing the integration, in order to maximize the efficiency. For example, the plug-in automatically parses the debug output for panic codes – you just have to switch to the plug-in window to read the description, which is in turn directly taken from the latest Symbian OS 9.3 system panic reference.

Features

Additionally, the plug-in allows manual lookup, featuring specialized auto-completion. Once you entered the first few letters of the panic category, you can jump to enter the number by pressing TAB. The standard Symbian OS error codes can be retrieved by searching for “Error -5” or in the other direction by entering “KErrNotSupported”.

By default, the devices do not display the error codes so that end-users are not confused. To enable error display, copy an empty ErrRd-file to the C:Resource-folder of your phone through the pkg-file of your application. It’s even easier if you just install a small ErrRd-SIS file, which creates this file for you.

Download

The plug-in along with documentation and installation instructions can be downloaded for free from symbianresources.com. Of course, the developers would like to hear your feedback, so don’t hesitate to comment here or email them if you find it useful or if you have any ideas on how to further improve the plug-in!

For additional comfort, the plug-in automatically parses the debug output and instantly displays the description, which was taken right from the latest SDK documentation.

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