[Engine-devel] Showing stacktrace info in GUI error dialog

[Martin Perina]

Hi,

I would like to correct a few things in this case.

The reason for patch [1] was to identify, from which part of engine code
InvocationTargetException came from. (more details are at [2] and [3]).
In both cases this exception was not logged in engine.log or server.log

Trying to verify this patch I found out this:

1) If this exception was raised during command/query execution, it would be part
   VdsReturnValue and shown in UI in Operation Canceled dialog. And what's most
   important, the exception would be definitely logged in engine.log

2) If this exception was raised on backend side outside of command/query execution
   (I simulated this by throwing RuntimeException inside Backend.runAction/runQuery)
   it would be shown in UI with HTTP status code (500 in this case) and also would
   be logged in engine.log

3) If this exception was raised somewhere servlet part of frontend code (GenericApiGWTServiceImpl)
   it would also be shown in UI with HTTP status code (500 in this case) and also
   would be logged in server.log

4) For all other cases there is shown dialog in UI with
    'Error while executing action: A Request to the Server failed: XXX'
   where XXX is the exception message. Patch [1] adds stacktrace to this dialog so
   we will be able to identify origin of those rare exceptions.

So the exception was raised somewhere else and since bugs [2],[3] wasn't been successfully
reproduced yet, it's the only way how to find out origin of the exception.

And I should also note, that I have no intention to show stacktrace in UI for "normal"
exceptions described in 1), 2) or 3)

Thanks

Martin


[1] http://gerrit.ovirt.org/23096
[2] http://bugzilla.redhat.com/1039248
[3] http://bugzilla.redhat.com/1034437



----- Original Message -----
> From: "Greg Sheremeta" <gshereme at redhat.com>
> To: "Einav Cohen" <ecohen at redhat.com>
> Cc: "engine-devel" <engine-devel at ovirt.org>, "users" <users at ovirt.org>, "Martin Perina" <mperina at redhat.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2014 6:35:53 PM
> Subject: Re: [Engine-devel] Showing stacktrace info in GUI error dialog
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Einav Cohen" <ecohen at redhat.com>
> > To: "engine-devel" <engine-devel at ovirt.org>, "users" <users at ovirt.org>,
> > "Martin Perina" <mperina at redhat.com>
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2014 11:23:34 AM
> > Subject: [Engine-devel] Showing stacktrace info in GUI error dialog
> > 
> > Hi, this is about patch [1] - showing server-side-exception
> > stacktrace info in GUI error dialog.
> > 
> > a couple of notes about this patch:
> > 
> > (1) I find it a little strange that server-side exceptions
> > are not logged in the server side and are / will be displayed
> > only on the client-side - this needs to be fixed first.
> > 
> +1.
> 
> > (2) once everything is logged on the server side, we can
> > debate whether it makes sense to put the full exception
> > stack-trace *also* in the GUI error pop-up.
> > I think that it is not completely necessary (since if there
> > is a server side exception, the user is likely to go to the
> > server side log anyway to get the full picture / context), but
> > if it is (and I'd like to hear your opinion about that) - we
> > shouldn't show the entire exception in the dialog once the dialog
> > is displayed - that's too much information to absorb.
> > We should show whatever we are showing today, and also something
> > like a "More Details" collapsible section (collapsed by default)
> > that, when expanded, displays the full exception details.
> > 
> > comments are welcome.
> 
> I personally appreciate web apps that allow me to see an error (or even
> expose an entire log file), but do so gracefully -- hide it under a option,
> use a "More Details" option like you mention, etc.
> 
> I think saving a person the step of ssh'ing to a server and digging for a log
> file is a nice-to-have.
> 
> Greg
> 
> > 
> > ----
> > Thanks,
> > Einav
> > 
> > [1] http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/23096/
> > _______________________________________________
> > Engine-devel mailing list
> > Engine-devel at ovirt.org
> > http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/engine-devel
> > 
>