For years now I\'ve quietly kept notes on how to react to the more arcane except
ID: 660652 • Letter: F
Question
For years now I've quietly kept notes on how to react to the more arcane exceptions our in-house developed system throws at us as we develop under it. I've discovered that other developers are doing this as well and have decided we need to create a place to share these notes.
We use Eclipse and I'd love it if someone could point me to an Eclipse plugin that would let us click on an exception in a stack trace and take us to a page associated with that exception being thrown from that class and method. A page where we could read or write up solutions we've found to that exception.
There may be no such plugin, I may have to copy the trace, but I'd settle for just knowing the generic name for such a system so I could go search myself.
Explanation / Answer
There are systems similar to what you're asking. I don't think there's a well-known generic name for them, I know them as "exception trackers", "exception loggers" or "error catchers". Examples (written in Ruby, clients for many languages):
airbrake.io (commercial, hosted)
exceptional.io (commercial, hosted)
errbit (open source, self-hosted)
Unfortunately, none of these offer the feature you asked for: Linking exceptions to known solutions. Neither do Eclipse Plugins exist to integrate them (as far as I know). There are Java clients though:
airbrake-java
Exceptional4j
errbit-java
Even though they don't cover your exact use case, they do provide you with the tools to
mark errors as resolved
aggregate / merge multiple errors of the same type
comment on errors
group errors across applications / deployments
They are also built to be extensible (APIs, Plugin systems), so I'm thinking writing an Eclipse Plugin to integrate with them and adding a feature to link exceptions to known solutions should be doable.
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