[BUG] Robot Advice Copy to Clipboard can crash app when clipboard is unavailable

[SalmanRajwani]

Component

Desktop App (Windows)

SQL Performance Studio Version

1.19.0

Operating System

Windows 11

Describe the Bug

Clicking Copy to Clipboard in the Robot Advice window can crash the app when the Windows clipboard is temporarily unavailable/busy.

This appears to be an unhandled async clipboard exception in the Robot Advice copy handler. The plan-analysis pipeline itself completed successfully locally, and the Robot Advice window/content also built and rendered successfully. The failure evidence points specifically to the clipboard write path.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open a valid execution plan.
2. Open Robot Advice.
3. Click Copy to Clipboard while the Windows clipboard is unavailable or busy.

Expected Behavior

The app should not terminate. Clipboard failures should be caught and surfaced as a non-fatal UI message, for example: "Clipboard is busy, try again."

Actual Behavior

The app can terminate with a Windows APPCRASH.

Observed Windows crash details:

Faulting application name: PlanViewer.App.exe
Faulting application version: 1.19.0.0
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll
Exception code: 0xe0434352

Managed exception stack captured locally:

System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: OpenClipboard Failed (0x800401D0 (CLIPBRD_E_CANT_OPEN))
   at Avalonia.Win32.ClipboardImpl.SetDataAsync(IAsyncDataTransfer dataTransfer)
   at PlanViewer.App.Services.AdviceWindowHelper.<>c__DisplayClass0_0.<<Show>b__2>d.MoveNext()
   at System.Threading.Tasks.Task.<>c.<ThrowAsync>b__124_0(Object state)
   at Avalonia.Threading.SendOrPostCallbackDispatcherOperation.InvokeCore()

Plan File

Not attached. The issue does not appear to be plan-specific, and I do not want to share query text or schema details publicly.

Additional Context

I checked for existing issues mentioning OpenClipboard, CLIPBRD_E_CANT_OPEN, and Robot Advice clipboard crashes and did not find a duplicate. The closest historical issue I found was #81, but that was for Robot/Human Advice windows not opening and Copy Repro Script behavior in 1.1.0, and it is closed.

[erikdarlingdata]

Thanks for the detailed report, especially the managed stack trace. That pinned it exactly: the Robot Advice copy handler awaited the clipboard write with no guard, so a locked clipboard took the whole app down.

Fixed in #416, merged to dev. The fix goes wider than the one button:

• Every clipboard read and write in the app now retries briefly while the clipboard is locked and fails soft instead of throwing. The Robot Advice button shows "Clipboard busy - try again" on failure, like you suggested.
• The same crash existed in two places inside Avalonia itself (the DataGrid's built-in Ctrl+C and TextBox copy/cut/paste). Both are intercepted and routed through the guarded path now.
• Unhandled exceptions get written to %LOCALAPPDATA%\PerformanceStudio\crash.log going forward, so future reports like this won't need Event Viewer digging.

This will ship in the next release.