BioDowloader provides validation for some input fields where the user tends to make misprints or errors most likely.
For each possible misprint or error, a red balloon with the exclamation mark pop-ups next to the field containing it:
If you place the mouse cursor over the red balloon, a pop-up error explanation will be shown:
In the given example, when the user creates a new task, the task settings have default values. The server Name field by default has the value of server.domain.com Such host doesn't exist, and that's why BioDownloader complains about this field.
When the user provides another value and, if it is correct in terms BioDownloader validation, then the red balloon disappears when the focus goes to the next field:
Besides that, for some destination fields the user can check their input value by clicking the magnifier button next to a field:
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If the destination field doesn't exist, Windows Explorer will notify the user about that immediately or after some timeout:
If you did not get rid of one or more red balloons indicating possible error(s), then BioDownloader will notify you about that during the task launch:
In some cases when the user is sure about the correctness of the input field(s), the user may ignore that message and continue.
If the error persists during the task running or another unforeseen critical error is encountered, the task fails, changes its status to Error. In this case the user can read the error type and its message on the Log tab page:
After that the user should re-check and fix the appropriate input field(s) on the first tab page, and restart the task.
Some of misprints are hard to be traced. Let's consider an example: there are no red balloons, the magnifier buttons open the destinations successfully but the result is not what was expected; the local folder is empty - no files are downloaded! The explanation is that the file mask is *.zip while the server destination contains files only with the gz extension.
Since this misprint is hard to notice BioDownloader warns the user about the possible error:
If you create several tasks that download/update files from the same server (let's say ftp.rcsb.org) and they exceed the limit of connections that the server allows simultaneously, then some of the tasks may fail and switch to the Error status solely because of that reason.
To avoid this problem either 1) limit the number of tasks dealing with the same server or 2) restart the Error tasks when the others same-server tasks are completed.
If you had several unsuccessful task launches, and ultimately the error message is that "... something didn't process ... when a timeout expired ...".
You may wish either a) to wait a couple of minutes or b) to close BioDownloader application, open BioDownloader again. After that you should restart the previously unsuccessful tasks. It might help because some of the server connections might haven't been closed since they are on hold and still waiting for the server response(s) because the timeout hasn't expired yet and, thus, the number of server connections from the same client IP address exceeds the server limit.