[ovirt-users] Obfuscated UI exception message debugging

[Alexander Wels]

Hi,

With the release of oVirt 3.6 the UI team added a handler for any uncaught 
exceptions. This handlers shows a popup that basically says the following:

Uncaught exception occurred. Please try reloading the page. Details:  [some 
information]

With the some information giving some indication of what happened. Usually 
that information is less than helpful. You can see the associated stack trace 
in the browser console, but since all the code is obfuscated the stack trace 
is usually pretty useless as well. I have been seeing a lot of bugs being 
opened about the popup. In an effort to help everyone understand what is going 
on and help us debug the root cause of the problem I created a wiki page [1] 
that shows some steps to 'de-obfuscate' manually the stack trace and provide 
hopefully some useful information.

Doing all of this labor intensive and not very intuitive, so in an effort to 
automate the process, I have also created a patch that sends the obfuscated 
stack trace to the engine and some code to automatically de-obfuscate the 
stack trace and write it to a UI specific log [2]. Once that patch is merged 
looking up UI exceptions should be as simple as looking in that log.

Hopefully the above will aid everyone in debugging any strange exceptions 
generated by the UI.

Alexander

[1] http://www.ovirt.org/OVirt_Engine_Debug_Obfuscated_UI
[2] https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/51558/