[UIMA-1852] improve examples in case where they fail to produce output due to ResultSpecifications

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.3.1SDK
• Assignee: Marshall Schor
• Reporter: Marshall Schor
• Created: 06/Aug/10 19:22
• Updated: 22/Sep/10 19:08
• Resolved: 06/Aug/10 19:25

Description

Several times users have been confused when they run example code for the PersonTitle annotator, or the TutorialDateTime annotator, and they see that no results were produced. This can be due to the passed in Result Specification to the primitive annotator having some specification, and the CAS being processed having an incompatible specification.

For instance, the TutorialDateTime annotator has an output capability specification that says it can produce date time output for CASes having the language "en" or a subset (e.g., "en-us"). If the CAS coming in has no language specified (or is x-unspecified) or is a language which is not a subset of "en" (e.g., pt-br - brazilian portuguese), then that annotator can't produce output.

Sometimes users forget to specify a language, and don't realize this. To help explain to users what is going on, have the example annotators print out a one-time message to the effect that they are not producing any output due to the result specification, and show the relevant parts of the specification, and the language coming in with the CAS.