Aspose error management

We used Aspose Total for many years, but we kind of abandoned it because it frequently “swallowed” errors without warning. In other words, we could never fully rely on Aspose’s error management to be sure that an error is properly caught and handled. Has error management improved significantly in recent versions?

@mbulwa,

Thanks for the details.

We have enhanced error handling in the APIs mostly in recent releases. We are sorry that you experienced issues with error management in the APIs. Could you tell us which Aspose APIs you are using? Also, please provide more details about your issues with sample code and sample files. We will evaluate those issues soon.

We used Aspose for 9 years, but slowly replacing certain functions that frequently stayed silent upon errors, which is a very difficult problem.
We mostly used Aspose PDF, but also Word and email. Other functions were used and abandoned as soon as we ran into these issues.
It will be nearly impossible to rescue the data and code that would reproduce these issues. The only thing we could do is to actively report every issue we encounter if we start now using again Aspose in strategic spots in our code. However, the cost of renewal of the Aspose license adds to the cost of acting as a test/beta site. We generate and/or convert over a hundred thousand PDFs a year from very diverse sources and formats. The tests are not just internal QC, we definitely need to rely on user feedback to detect errors that the software fails to report. Perhaps you may discuss with sales and grant us a couple of month delay in paying for a production license. It cannot be a traditional eval because we need to count on user feedback. It may be a timed production version or simply a delayed payment. If you do that, we will be glad to start reporting to you valuable feedback to better your product.
Thank you

@mbulwa,

Yes, we appreciate if you could post your issues (one issue per thread) in respective forums separately. This will help us to evaluate each issue precisely to consequently figure it out soon.

This needs to be discussed. We are evaluating it internally and will get back to you soon.

@mbulwa,

Can you please be more specific about the type of errors which you think are not caught and thrown by the APIs? As you know, every document structure becomes different due to its variety of contents, so some times the formatting issues might not be identified in unique scenarios. However, you can share such scenarios with us, so we can fix those particular issues. Anyway, please do help us better understand your scenarios and related issues. In the meanwhile, we’re discussing with our business team to find out how best we can help you.

We spent millions of Dollars in programming labor and software licenses through the years, developing our internal platform, A considerable fraction of that was spent on code based on Aspose PDF, Email and Word. It was painful and irritating to send all of that to waste two or three years ago after realizing that Aspose was the reason why we needed to waste resources handling customer complaints and diagnosing problems in our processing. Our code library has a lot of functions renamed with a suffix indicating “_WOAspose”, meaning without Aspose.

If your question was about the errors we got from Aspose the simple answer is none, and that is actually the problem. If your question instead was about what errors Aspose should have reported, unfortunately we no longer have the Aspose-trained staff that dealt with them because we replaced Aspose with other SDKs. However, as I had some management and coding involvement myself, I will try to articulate a partial answer as follows:

During our history as a service provider, we ingested a huge number of files supplied by thousands of companies. Aspose was used mainly for our Accounts Payable line, where we ingested over a million emails each with one or more attachments, mostly in PDF format. Many of these PDF files were created with cheap or substandard software, violating PDF syntax rules. I do remember Aspose functions failing to perform their actions on some of these but without raising an error. It was very obvious that Aspose was unable to properly handle such conditions and we could not wait for Aspose to fix it, so we did not report them to your tech support. I do not remember specifics, and unfortunately we did not document each incident. This was not the only problem, but at least it gives you an idea of why we had to get rid of Aspose. Now that we replaced all the critical points we have the ability to implement a parallel test platform using Aspose and send to it only emails and files that our production platform tags as suspicious or needed to repair before further processing.

The replacement SDKs are not perfect either, but at least they do raise an error when necessary.

I hope this helps. Thank you

@mbulwa

Thanks for sharing further details and sorry for the inconvenience you had to face.

I’m afraid, without the specifics of the issues, it’s not easy to work it out. We would love to help you out, but for that we need to find out specific scenarios where Aspose fails. We work closely with our customers if and when such scenarios come up, but we need information like the input and output files along with the specific code where the issue occurs.

Moreover, I would recommend you to try a free temporary license with our latest APIs to find out if it works in your scenarios. It looks like you guys upgraded Aspose license about 7 years ago and we have improved the APIs quite a lot since then. So I would really appreciate you to try the free license with our latest versions. If you feel comfortable with the latest versions of the APIs then you may get an upgraded license from our business team at a discounted price.

However, if you still notice any issues while using latest APIs with the temporary license then please do share the specifics and we’ll be happy to provide you a fix for those issues.

We’re looking forward to working with you.

Well, given your response I think we should close this case and move on. My closing comments follow:

  1. You missed or ignored the fact that I never asked for a free upgrade.

  2. You missed or ignored the fact that our feedback would be as useful and valuable to you and your developers as it may be to me.

  3. You missed or ignored my explanation that I cannot guarantee results for our identification of errors without client feedback. An eval has watermarks and “ticking bomb” protections that should never reach a client.

  4. I talked to other developers who used Aspose and they were of similar opinion. Looks like you chose to ignore reports submitted by other developers, as I cannot believe I am the only one.

I do not want to mix and eval license with the old production license, so the only way to isolate the eval from all our production work would be to dedicate one development/diagnostic station and run parallel tests on modified code, hoping that we can see the errors without relying on user feedback. That is a costly proposition.

So, thank you for your time. Wish you luck.