Displaying Specific Error or Validation Messages from Business Rules in Infor CRM Mobile

There are many cases where you’d want to throw a ValidationException in an entity event or business rule in Infor CRM. This is a common practice where you’ll throw the exception and the message is displayed to the user when using the full web client. However, in the mobile client, the user will never see the message for the ValidationException and instead will only see the generic “A server error occurred while requesting data”

An an example, lets say we have code in the Contact entity OnBeforeInsert to make sure the entered email address for a new contact is unique. If it’s not, you’ll throw a ValidationException in the rule as follows:

throw new Sage.Platform.Application.ValidationException("The email address " + email + " already exists on another contact");

When the user is using the web client, they’ll see this message, however, that’s not the case when using the mobile client. What we want the user to see is this:

But what the user actually sees is this:

We can change this behavior. Ideally, we’d be able to identify only ValidationExceptions and display the message for those only, leaving the rest of the error types as generic, less scary messages. However, there’s not really anyway to determine the Exception type from the SData error object. Instead, we’ll just change the behavior to always display the specific error message, rather than the less-helpful generic error message. To do this, we’ll modify the base edit page, _EditBase in argos-sdk. Add the following code to your ApplicationModule:

// be sure to add 'dojo/_base/lang' to AMD modules at the top

lang.extend(argos._EditBase, {
    getErrorMessage: function(error) {
        var message = this.errorText.general;

        if (error) {
            message = this.errorText.status[error.status] || this.errorText.general;
            	
            var response = lang.getObject('xhr.responseText', false, error);
            if (response) {
                var errorObject = JSON.parse(response);
                if (Array.isArray(errorObject)) errorObject = errorObject[0];
                if (errorObject && errorObject.hasOwnProperty('message')) {
                    message = errorObject.message;
                }
            }
        }

        return message;
    }
});

The code above just replaces the existing getErrorMessage function, it unwraps the error object and gets the message and returns it. Note, if you wanted to only do this on a specific page, like the Contact edit page, you could replace argos._EditBase with crm.Views.Contact.Edit. Also, if you only wanted to do this for the result from a specific business rule, like the OnBeforeInsert of the Contact entity, you could check the stackTrace property of the errorObject from the code above to check if it contains “ContactBusinessRules.OnBeforeUpdate”.