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kobotoolbox / kpi

kpi is the (frontend) server for KoboToolbox. It includes an API for users to access data and manage their forms, question library, sharing settings, create reports, and export data.
https://www.kobotoolbox.org
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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`except Exception` frustrates debugging #2064

Open jnm opened 5 years ago

jnm commented 5 years ago

Copying my gripe from https://github.com/kobotoolbox/kpi/issues/2057#issuecomment-436302676 into a new issue.

@noliveleger, here's an example of how trying to handle exceptions gracefully can make debugging much harder: https://github.com/kobotoolbox/kpi/blob/550dc439aa9a38fc444ba5745d27be21177b0625/kpi/models/asset.py#L885-L901

If the exception weren't caught, we'd get a stack trace with local variables in Sentry. Instead, we get src, id_string, uid, _msg, and warnings (and _msg isn't even shown?): https://sentry.kbtdev.org/kobo/kpi-backend/issues/2837/.

I think this is basically the same situation as https://github.com/kobotoolbox/kpi/issues/1705, but we'll have to figure out whether some of the exceptions that could be raised here have to do with user error, e.g. invalid XLSForms.

For now, I'll try calling FormPack.to_xml() manually inside the Django shell to get a useful traceback.

jnm commented 5 years ago

Also, in this particular case, the error shown is not helpful to the user, either: image