I want to catch the exceptions thrown from item reader (e.g. reader not open , incorrect token exceptions etc) and handle it. Currently spring batch is throwing them as fatal exceptons and come out of the step.
Please let me know if there is any way to do it?
I faced the same issue whereby I wanted to catch the
org.springframework.batch.item.file.FlatFileParseException
thrown by the FlatFileItemReader and perform some custom handling & logging. Did some research and almost reached the conclusion that I might have to write a custom reader instead of the default reader I was currently using, until I stumbled upon a gem of a section in the Spring Batch documentation: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/reference/html/configureStep.html#interceptingStepExecution
You can write a custom implementation of the ItemReadListener<T> interface and over-ride the onReadError(Exception ex) method and then register this listener class in the corresponding step. As such, this method will then be called when the reader encounters an exception while reading from the file. The exception reference will be passed to the method as well using which you can do as you please like logging etc.
Similarly, writing a #OnReadError annotated method is also an alternative if you don't want to implement the ItemReadListener interface separately.
On a different note, if your whole purpose is to skip such exceptions that might occur while reading, you can try adding following to the chunk configuration in the XML:
<skippable-exception-classes>
<include class="org.springframework.batch.item.file.FlatFileParseException"/>
</skippable-exception-classes>
Ref: http://docs.spring.io/spring-batch/reference/html/configureStep.html#configuringSkip
Problem solved! :)
Related
i have a custom ExceptionFilterAttribute in place that almost logs anything that gets thrown in a controller. Almost means that there are circumstances where this filter does not handle exceptions. This is where there is now a custom service that implements the IExceptionLogger interface that handles everything. This is where it gets messy.
Both handle the exception creating duplicate logs. The Attribute is prefered since it contains more custom information (dependency injected).
Is there any built in way to mark the exception as handled in order to avoid the service if the filter is used?
Is there any other way to catch only the exceptions that the filter did not handle?
I was reading the documentation for cfthrow and came accross this
When to use the cfthrow tag
Use the cfthrow tag when your application can identify and handle
application-specific errors. One typical use for the cfthrow tag is in
implementing custom data validation. The cfthrow tag is also useful
for throwing errors from a custom tag page to the calling page.
For example, on a form action page or custom tag used to set a
password, the application can determine whether the password entered
is a minimum length, or contains both letters and number, and throw an
error with a message that indicates the password rule that was broken.
The cfcatch block handles the error and tells the user how to correct
the problem.
Have I been doing it wrong all this time or is this just a terrible use-case?
I was taught that exceptions shouldn't be used to handle regular application flow but for stuff that is somewhat out of your control. For example, a file being locked when you go to write to it.
A user breaking a password rule doesn't quite sound like something that's out of your control.
That is a poor example not a poor use case. I personally would pass in the parameters to a validation function and return a result that contained a pass or fail and a collection of failure messages to display to the user.
How I use exceptions is as follows.
Within functions. Let's say that you have a function that you are getting some data from the database and you are then constructing a structure from it. If the query returned has no values you have several options:-
You could return an empty structure and let the calling code deduce the problem from the fact the structure is empty. This is not ideal because then the application has to have complicated logic to address the missing data.
You could return a more complex datatype where one property is whether the process went ok and the actual data. Again this is not optimal as you have to then make this access the property on every call when the majority of the time you have data and again your application is dealing with this issue.
Or you could raise a custom exception with cfthrow indicating that there is no record that matches. This then means that you can choose to ignore the prospect of this error happening and let it bubble up to the onError handler or you could surround it in a try catch statement and deal with it there and then. This keeps your API clean and sensible.
Wrapping external errors let's say that you connect to an external API using cfhttp over https. Now this requires installing the certificate in your keystore otherwise it throws an error. If this certificate gets updated then it will start erroring again. In this instance I would wrap the call in a try catch and should this be the error I would wrap that in my own custom exception with a message detailing that we need to update the cert in the keystore so that any developer debugging it knows what to do to fix it without having to work it out. If it is not that particular error then I would cfrethrow it so that it bubbles up and is dealt with by whatever exception handling logic is above the call.
These are just a few examples, but there are more. To summarise I would say that throwing exceptions is a way of communicating up through the tiers of an application when something has occurred that is not the hoped for behaviour while keeping your API/Application logic clean and understandable.
It's really up to your discretion. It's extremely common in many languages to use exceptions for everything, including input validation.
Importantly, exceptions have nothing to do with something being in your control or not. For example, suppose that you have a fairly long and complicated module that uploads a file. There are many fail points in something like that: the file could be too big, the file could be the wrong format, etc. Without exceptions your only option is a lot of if/then checks and some kind of status return at the very end. With exceptions, all you have to do is use a set of cfthrows:
<cfthrow type="FileUpload.TooBig" message="The file size was #FileSize#, but the maximum size allowed is #MaxFileSize#">
<cfthrow type="FileUpload.WrongType" message="The file type was #FilType#, but the accepted types are #AcceptedTypeList#">
Then, whatever is calling the file upload function can catch either with <cfcatch type="FileUpload"> or catch a specific one (e.g. <cfcatch type="FileUpload.WrongType">).
Also, technically a user breaking a password is out of your control, in the sense that the user has determined the value for the password. That said, I loathe password rules as invariably they make it harder, not easier, to maintain security.
I’m struggling fully understanding when/how exceptions are thrown in JSF 2.0. I’ve looked for a solution longer than I care to admit. Ultimately, the goal I want to achieve is “handle” an unhandled exceptions. When an exception is thrown, I want to be able to capture information of interest about the exception, and email that to the appropriate site administrators. I’m forcing an error by throwing a new FacesException() in the constructor of one of my backing beans. I had this working great in JSF 1.1 using MyFaces implementation. I was able to get this working by wrapping the Default Lifecycle and simply overriding the execute() and render() methods. I followed this awesome post by Hanspeter to get that working:
"http://insights2jsf.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/using-a-custom-lifecycle-implementation-to-handle-exceptions-in-jsf-1-2/#comment-103"
I am now undergoing a site upgrade to JSF 2.0 using Mojarra’s. And things work great still as long as the exception is thrown/caught in the execute() method, however; the moment I enter the render(), the HttpServletResponse.isCommitted() equals true, and the phase is PhaseId RENDER_RESPONSE which of course means I can’t perform a redirect or forward. I don’t understand what has changed between JSF 1.1 and 2.0 in regards to when/how the response is committed. As I indicated, I had this working perfectly in the 1.1 framework.
After much searching I found that JSF 2.0 provides a great option for exception handling via a Custom ExceptionHandler. I followed Ed Burns’ blog, Dealing Gracefully with ViewExpiredException in JSF2:
"http://weblogs.java.net/blog/edburns/archive/2009/09/03/dealing-gracefully-viewexpiredexception-jsf2"
As Ed indicates there is always the web.xml way by defining the tag and what type of exception/server error code and to what page one wants sent to for the error. This approach works great as long as I’m catching 404 errors. One interesting thing to note about that however, is if I force a 404 error by typing a non-exsitant URL like /myApp/9er the error handler works great, but as soon as I add “.xhtml” extension (i.e. /myApp/9er.xhtml) then the web.xml definition doesn’t handle it.
One thing I noticed Ed was doing that I hadn’t tried was instead of trying to do a HttpServletRespone.sendRedirect(), he is utilizing the Navigationhandler.handleNavigation() to forward the user to the custom error page. Unfortunately, this method didn’t do anything different than what Faclets does with the error by default. Along with that of course, I was unable to do HttpServletResponse.sendRedirect() due to the same problems as mentioned above; response.isCommitted() equals true.
I know this post is getting long so I will make a quick note about trying to use a PhaseListener for the same purposes. I used the following posts as a guide with this route still being unsuccessful:
"http://ovaraksin.blogspot.com/2010/10/global-handling-of-all-unchecked.html" "http://ovaraksin.blogspot.com/2010/10/jsf-ajax-redirect-after-session-timeout.html"
All and all I have the same issues as already mentioned. When this exception is thrown, the response is already in the committed phase, and I’m unable to redirect/forward the user to a standard error page.
I apologize for such a long post, I’m just trying to give as much information as possible to help eliminate ambiguity. Anyone have any ideas/thoughts to a work around, and I’m curious what might be different between JSF 1.1 and 2.0 that would cause the response to be committed as soon as I enter the render() phase of the Lifecycle.
Thanks a ton for any help with this!!!
So this question is actually not just about a custom exception handler (for which JSF 2 has the powerful ExceptionHandlerFactory mechanism), but more about showing the user a custom error page when the response has already been committed.
One universal way to always be able to redirect the user even if the last bit has already been written to the response is using a HttpServletResponse wrapper that buffers headers and content being written to it.
This does have the adverse effect that the user doesn't see the page being build up gradually.
Maybe you can use this technique to only capture the very early response commit that JSF 2.0 seems to do. As soon as render response starts, you emit the headers you buffered till so far and write out the response content directly.
This way you might still be able to redirect the user to a custom error page if the exception occurs before render response.
I have successfully implemented a filter using response wrapper as described above which avoids the response being commited and allows redirection to a custom page even on an exception in the middle of rendering the page.
The response wrapper sets up its own internal PrintWriter on a StringWriter, which is returned by the getWriter method so that the faces output is buffered. In the happy path, the filter subsequently writes the internal StringWriter contents to the actual response. On an exception, the filter redirects to an error jsp which writes to the (as yet uncommitted) response.
For me, the key to avoiding the response getting committed was to intercept the flushBuffer() method (from ServletResponse, not HttpServletResponse), and avoid calling super.flushBuffer(). I suspect that depending on circumstances and as noted above, it might also be necessary to also override some of the other methods, eg the ones that set headers.
I found questions here Should a retrieval method return 'null' or throw an exception when it can't produce the return value? and Should functions return null or an empty object?, but I think my case is quite different.
I'm writing an application that consists of a webservice and a client. The webservice is responsible to access data, and return data to the client. I design my app like this:
//webservice
try
{
DataTable data = GetSomeData(parameter);
return data
}
catch (OopsException ex)
{
//write some log here
return null;
}
//client:
DataTable data = CallGetSomeData(parameter);
if(data == null)
{
MessageBox.Show("Oops Exception!");
return;
}
Well, there is a rule of not returning null. I don't think that I should just rethrow an exception and let the client catch SoapException. What's your comment? Is there better approach to solve this problem?
Thank you.
In your case, an exception has already been thrown and handled in some manner in your web service.
Returning null there is a good idea because the client code can know that something errored out in your web service.
In the case of the client, I think the way you have it is good. I don't think there is a reason to throw another exception (even though you aren't in the web service anymore).
I say this, because, technically, nothing has caused an error in your client code. You are just getting bad data from the web service. This is just a matter of handling potentially bad input from an outside source.
Personally, as a rule of thumb, I shy away from throwing exceptions when I get bad data since the client code can't control that.
Just make sure you handle the data == null condition in such a way that it doesn't crash your client code.
In general i try to design my webservices in such way that they return a flag of some sort that indicates whether there was a technical/functional error or not.
additionally i try to return a complex object for result not just a string, so that i can return things like:
result->Code = "MAINTENANCE"
result->MaintenanceTill = "2010-10-29 14:00:00"
so for a webservice that should get me a list of dataEntities i will return something like:
<result>
<result>
<Code>OK</Code>
</result>
<functionalResult>
<dataList>
<dataEntity>A</dataEntity>
</dataList>
</functionalResult>
</result>
so every failure that can occur behind my webservice is hidden in a error result.
the only exceptions that developers must care about while calling my webservice are the exceptions or errors that can occur before the webservice.
All the WebServices that I've used return objects, not simple data types. These objects usually contain a bool value named Success that lets you test very quickly whether or not to trust the data returned. In either event, I think any errors thrown should be untrappable (i.e. unintentional) and therefore signify a problem with the service itself.
I think there may be a few factors to consider when making a decision:
what is the idiomatic way to do this in the language your using (if it wasn't a webservice)
how good your soap/webservice library is (does it propogate exceptions or no)
what's the easiest thing for the client to do
I tend to make the client do the easiest, idiomatic thing, within the limitations of the library. If the client lib doesn't take care of auto restoring serialized exceptions I would probably wrap it with a lib that did so I could do the following.
Client:
try:
# Restore Serialized object, rethrow if exception
return CallGetSomeData(parameter);
except Timeout, e:
MessageBox.Show("timed out")
except Exception, e:
MessageBox.Show("Unknown error")
exit(1)
WebService:
try:
return GetSomeData(parameter) # Serialized
except Exception, e:
return e # Serialized
Your first problem is "a rule of not returning null". I would strongly suggest reconsidering that.
Returning a SoapException is a possibility, but like hacktick already mentioned, it would be better to return a complex object with a status flag {Success,Fail} with every response from the web service.
I think it all boils down to the question whether or not your client can use any info as to why no data was returned.
For example - if no data was returned because the (say sql) server that is called in GetSomeData was down, and the client can actually do something with that information (e.g. display an appropriate message) - you don't want to hide that information - throwing an error is more informative.
Another example - if parameter is null, and that causes an exception.. (although you probably should have taken care of that earlier in the code.. But you get the idea) - should have throw an appropriate (informative) exception.
If the client doesn't care at all why he didn't get any data back, you may return null, he'll ignore the error text anyhow and he's code will look the same..
If your client and service are running on different machines or different processes, it will be impossible to throw an error from the service and catch it on the client. If you insist on using exceptions, the best you can hope for is some proxy on the client to detect the error condition (either null or some other convention) and re-throw a new exception.
The general practice in handling exception is, when the sequence of flow is expected in the normal circumstance where as the sequence could not be completed due to non-availability of resources or expected input.
In your case, you still need to decide how do you want your client side code to react for null or exception.
How about passing in a delegate to be invoked when anything bad happens? The delegate could throw an exception if that's what the outside could would like, or let the function return null (if the outside code will check for that), or possibly take some other action. Depending upon the information passed to the delegate, it may be able to deal with problem conditions in such a way as to allow processing to continue (e.g. the delegate might set a 'retry' flag the first few times it's called, in case flaky network connections are expected). It may also be possible for a delegate to log information that wouldn't exist by the time an exception could get caught.
PS--It's probably best to pass a custom class to the problem-detected delegate. Doing that will allow for future versions of the method to provide additional information to the delegate, without breaking any implementations that expect the simpler information.
Exceptions are recommended in the same process space. Across processes, it is only through information that a success/failure is evaluated.
Since you are the client to your webservice, you can log the exception at the service layer and return null to the client, yet the client should still know if the CallGetSomeData returned null because a) data is not available, or b) there is a database exception as the table is locked. Hence its always good to know what has caused the error for easier reporting at client side. You should have a error code and description as part of your message.
If you are not consuming your webservice then you should definetly throw exception for the same reasons mentioned above, client should know what has happened and its upto them to decide to what to do with that.
We are developing a proxy in WCF that will serve as a means of communication for some handhelds running our custom client application. I am curious what error handling strategies people use as I would rather not wrap EVERY proxy call in try/catch.
When I develop ASP .NET I dont catch the majority of exceptions, I leverage Application_Error in Global asax which can then log the exception, send an email, and redirect the user to a custom error landing page. What I am looking for in WCF is similar to this, except that it would allow me to pass a general faultreason to the client from a central location.
Basically I am curious how people centralize their exception handling in WCF apps.
Thanks
You might find the IErrorHandler interface useful here. We've been using this to do pretty much what you mention - centralised exception logging and providing generalised fault reasons without having to litter the code with numerous try/catches to try and deal with the problem locally.
So here is what I did. We have a few custom exceptions in our application such as BusinessRuleException and ProcessException, WCF supports both FaultException and FaultException<T>.
General practice seems to be that you always throw FaultException to the client in the case of a general error or an error that you dont want to display exactly what happened. In other cases you can pass FaultException<T> where T is a class with information about the particular exception.
I created this concept of Violations in the application, which basically meant that any custom exception had a property containing the corresponding Violation instance. This instance was then passed down to the client enabling the client to recognize when a recoverable error had occured.
This solved part of the problem, but I still wanted a general catch all that would allow me to centeralize logging. I found this by using the IErrorHandle interface and adding my own custom error handler to WCF. Here is the code:
public class ServiceHostGeneralErrorHandler : IErrorHandler
{
public void ProvideFault(Exception ex, MessageVersion version, ref Message fault)
{
if (ex is FaultException)
return;
// a general message to the client
var faultException = new FaultException("A General Error Occured");
MessageFault messageFault = faultException.CreateMessageFault();
fault = Message.CreateMessage(version, messageFault, null);
}
public bool HandleError(Exception ex)
{
// log the exception
// mark as handled
return true;
}
}
Using this method, I can convert the exception from whatever it is to something that can be easily displayed on the client while at the same time logging the real exception for the IT staff to see. So far this approach is working quite well and follows the same structure as other modules in the application.
We use the Exception Handling Application block and shield most faults from clients to avoid disclosing sensitive information, this article might be a good starting point for you, as with "best practices" - you should use what fits your domain.