VBA Error handling for "Send a frown" [Power Pivot/Power BI]

How do I catch a "Send a Frown" error in VBA?

Err.Number and Err.Description does not contain the "Send a Frown" error but it displays on the screen halting the current process.

Capture - Send a frown.PNG

I did some research on this. You must be using Power Pivot or Power BI, because that's where the message comes from (would have been helpful to include this context in your description). And I have found no way to trap it in VBA. Someone with specific experience in those products may have more to add.

Hi Jeff,

Yes, it does originate from Power BI, the background process is "Microsoft Mashup Evaluation Container"
Attached is a screenshot of the "Task Manager"

Mashup.png

When data is refreshed, I get a message box "Send a Frown" at unpredictable, inconsistent intervals. For example, it will work seamlessly for five or six times then suddenly it will fail, and give this "Send a frown" message.

I need to develop my VBA code to step over this message. A normal VBA error handler does not deal with this. Not even an "On Error Resume next" deals with it. I can thus not capture the error (err) and deal with it in my code. When the "Send a frown" message appears, the entire process is on hold until I (the human) clicks on "Send a frown" or "Cancel". This is problematic since this process runs 3am in the morning on our servers.

The other option is to find a way to completely disable the "Send a frown" option.

This is a small cut of the system log that it generates during the "Send a frown":
Error Log.PNG

Since the error is not actually generated by your VBA code, I doubt you can handle it, other than perhaps using API calls to await the appearance of a message.

1. I'm not Jeff.
2. You could try Microsoft's Answers
3. Not offhand, and apparently I'm not allowed to give you links to samples on other forums.

Originally Posted by rorya

3. Not offhand, and apparently I'm not allowed to give you links to samples on other forums.

You are allowed to give links to threads on other forums that are are relevant to a question here. We don't want people including links solely for the purpose of promoting commercial sites.

There's a big difference between commercial and competing, both of which are apparently off-limits. Anyway, I'll see if I can find the thread I was thinking of and we'll see.

The spirit of the rule is to stop advertising and trying to lure members to join other sites. This is clearly not the case here, Rory is trying to show help to a member, that is appears to be beyond the scope of this forum.

Rory, if you find that link, please share it.