Critical events / RPM update 6.2.0.492

RPM Remote Print Manager® ("RPM") update 6.2.0.492 was available November 26, 2018. This update includes the following items.

Critical events

We introduced critical events. Recently we were discussing a customer issue where they were attempting to use a printer whose configuration was so degraded that in a normal Windows application, if you clicked on the printer, you would get a dialog along the lines of "this printer is driverless."

Unfortunately, we were not able to get a screenshot.

To make a long story short, we decided that there were enough severe problems that we needed to find a way to escalate them to the user. We have started to designate specific runtime errors as "critical events". RPM handles them with the following:

  1. RPM will write an entry to a new database table called "alerts". If the "alerts" table does not exist, RPM will generate an event log message.
  2. RPM will attempt to send an email to the address configured for alerts in the user interface. If there is no alert address, RPM will generate an event log message.
  3. When the user interface supports critical events, it will pop up a window showing the most recent current events with the option to dismiss.

Please see this article on critical events to learn more about what we flag and why.

Action Init messages

In the interest of documenting when actions start, we have made the "Init" phase of all the actions add to the message log [/message-log]. Some of the newer actions did not have this, and some of the older actions had a custom message which we swapped out for the standard message.

This way, if a customer has issues tracking down jobs, we can consistently identify the start of the action processing.

This is in part related to the slow printing article and to other recent RPM updates