AutoCAD: Automation Error. Description was not provided.

While I am certain that the error message in the title above will be issued for any number of reasons, I came across this when some users were trying to run a custom AutoLISP^® routine that draws an area to be enlarged "box". Until yesterday, I was unable to reproduce the issue on my own computer, making it hard to figure out what was causing the error. Having determined at least one cause for this error message, I decided to document it here.

Finally running into the error myself yesterday, I was able to use the VisualLisp IDE to step through the main routine and determine that the crash was occuring during a call to a subroutine that returns a list of the Layer Keys in the current Layer Key Style. While I would like to think of myself as a relatively competent AutoLISP programmer, there are definitely areas where my skills and experience are thin; error handling routines are one such area. At the time I wrote that subroutine, I was not aware that the out-of-the-box (AecLayerKeyList) function (defined in AecLMgrLISP.arx) would do what I wanted from my subroutine (I was likely confused by the description of the routine as returning "a resbuf list of strings"), so I wrote my own, with no error handling. It turns out that at some point in the past, our office standard Layer Key Style ended up with a corrupt Layer Key. Attempting to read the name of this layer key results in the "undescribed" error. Both the (AecLayerKeyList) function and the Style Manager are capable of handling the error. Style Manager just omits the corrupt Layer Key; the (AecLayerKeyList) function includes the name as an empty string (""), which is not valid input for the name of a Layer Key.

Overwriting the "bad" Layer Key Style with one that does not have the corrupt Layer Key resolves the error and allows the area-to-be-enlarged routine to run. That was much easier than adding error handling to my routine, and should probably be done in any event.