Rosetta offers a vast variety of functions, supporting various media types. Some function categories such as database may be expecting certain environments to be installed in the target system. Functions in the PowerPoint and Excel category encapsulates many of the object layer handles. This means that certain functions will only work, if you first call a function in a higher layer. For example, trying to insert text into PowerPoint before PowerPoint is launched will result in an error returned. Other instances of errors may arise from passing in parameters of the wrong data type.
ALL functions in the Rosetta xtra will return a negative number when encountering an error. Please note that even if the function specifications in this document specifies a different return data type under normal circumstances, Rosetta xtra will always return negative integers during errors. Using negative integers helps developers easily catch errors because this error handling technique is universal to all functions. There is no need to write different error handling schemes for each function category.
To help with debugging errors, many function categories have a xxxErr( ) (example pptErr( ), zipErr( ) ) handler that will return a string describing the error. This handler should be called immediately following an error. The error messages are automatically reset after each call.
The error codes page lists some of the more frequent errors returned by Rosetta.