Is there a way to include an error description string in a crash report? I'm talking about crash reports that are sent via iTunes Connect. It would be nice if I could log the reason for a crash.
This question asks about including console output, but I'd be happy just to able to include an error description string, without resorting to a 3rd party library.
EDIT:
There are errors I can detect where it's unwise or impossible to attempt to recover, because the program is probably in a corrupt state. I'd rather not catch these exceptions so that I get automatic error reporting with a stack trace. Sometimes, there is extra information that I'd like to log (that cannot be deduced from the stack trace), such as the current state of a state machine.
How about a third party crash reporter? I've integrated QuincyKit, and even found a way to annotate them.
Also, when the app actively begs for the crash report to be sent to the support, you get much more of them. The things you learn...
I've searched and searched. There seems to no way to annotate a pending crash report. If someone comes up with an answer, I'll change the accepted answer.
Related
i used Bugsense framework in iPhone application to get the crashe logs, and it works fine.
but when i get the crash report from iTunes account, the crash report indicate that there is a crash in bugSense framework.
What this is mean? is it indicate that crashes in applications reported by bugSense ? or it is actual crash in the framework itself?
Please Help.
Thx
It could be, that this is a crash in their SDK. Sadly they perform non-async safe functions in their framework once the crash happened. See http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/objc/Reliable_Crash_Reporting.20110912.html for more details on what that means (in this case calling Objective-C code once a crash occurred is unsafe). You might want to contact them to make the fix this possible problem.
But the messages lower in the stack trace also indicate, that this is a crash that happened because of an uncaught exception occurred, which would normally cause another Last Exception Backtrace to appear on top of Thread 0. I am not sure if they have that functionality included. If they do, this causes that block only appear in their own crash report but not in the crash reports iOS creates. Then this is nothing to worry about, except that code above being bad as already mentioned.
If you have enabled immediate dispatch in BugSense, this is probably the reason of this crash, as it isn't guaranteed to be safe.
For more info you can check this: https://github.com/bugsense/plcrashreporter-bugsense/wiki/Using-the-BugSense-2.x-iOS-library , section Enabling immediate dispatch
this may happen when there is no internet connection, try enable immediate dispatch in bug sense
Will failed assert statements generate crash reports (with stack traces) that'll wind their way through iTunes Connect?
I'd like to know the same thing for NSAssert as well as uncaught C++/Obj-C exceptions.
Please note that I'm using assertions for internal consistency and logic errors, not for things like file errors.
If they don't generate error reports, is there a way to make them (with custom macros, exception handlers, etc)? It's important that I be able to obtain a stack trace.
Xcode will, by default, disable NSAssert() macros for release builds if you are using one of the standard Xcode templates. Alternately, you can disable them yourself by adding an NS_BLOCK_ASSERTIONS flag to Other C++ Flags in your Build Settings.
Yes, uncaught exceptions will generate a crash report - I'm looking at one from the iTunes Connect crash reporter right now! Basically, almost anything that causes your application to crash and save logs will send reports back to Apple.
That said, if you're worried about it you may want to implement your own handler for crash reporting, because a) only users who opt to share diagnostic information with Apple will send crash reports back to iTunes Connct, and b) there is no guarantee that even then a crash report will make it back to you for review.
You can either do this yourself using uncaught exception handlers, through an existing analytics package (Flurry supports this), or use an open source library which are of variable quality (here's one I've found online - I implement my own code for my reporting, so your mileage may vary!)
I trying to write a a crash report feature that when you launch the app after a crash, it will offer to send the crash report to the server. I can't find how to get the crash log within the app. I saw there is a framework that doing so (PLCrashReporter), however this framework is large and I don't need most of it's features.
Does anyone knows how to simply access the log?
Thanks,
Guy.
I guess I don't have the karma to add a comment to Nimrod Gat's answer, so I have to provide my follow-up here. I'll try to make it worthy of a standalone answer.
It's very, very difficult to write a safe, correct, and reliable crash reporter, especially one that runs directly in-process. The code referenced in Nimrod Gat's answer is not correct and honestly, that blog post should be retracted. Signal handlers must only run async-safe code, and that code isn't async-safe:
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?SignalSafety
Crash handling is even more complicated than normal signal handling, because that you can't expect the process to continue to run successfully after your signal handler returns.
It's tempting to think you can just hack together a simpler solution, and it will work some of the time, but there's a good reason people like Google's engineers have thousands of LoC dedicated to reliable crash reporting:
http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/
On iOS, you should just use PLCrashReporter. On other platforms (such as Mac OS X) you should use Google Breakpad. There's no point in re-inventing this wheel unless you're going to do it not only correctly, but better than what already exists.
I had this similar issue and the PLCrashReported seemed too complicated for what I wanted to do.
Note that you can't access the crash report generated by Apple, the PLCrashReport generates it's own reports and store them in the user's cache folder.
Eventually, I used the following example:
http://cocoawithlove.com/2010/05/handling-unhandled-exceptions-and.html
it's very simple and easy to use, just register exception and signal handlers using:
NSSetUncaughtExceptionHandler(&HandleException);
signal(SIGABRT, SignalHandler);
signal(SIGILL, SignalHandler);
signal(SIGSEGV, SignalHandler);
signal(SIGFPE, SignalHandler);
signal(SIGBUS, SignalHandler);
signal(SIGPIPE, SignalHandler);
and get the stack trace using the backtrace method in UncaughtExceptionHandler class.
Maybe a better solution will be to use a fully specialized end-2-end solution/service? Such as http://apphance.com. It is currently in closed beta testing phase, but you can ask for participation and we'll get back to you pretty quickly. The only thing you need to do is to register for an API key and embed a small framework library into your app (or .jar file in android). Then you have remote access not only to crashlogs but also to a debug logs generated by the application - which makes it much more useful. It is for now targeted to be used during testing, but there will soon be a lite version that you will be able to embed into app-store-released application.
Inside the framework we are doing all the magic of plugging-into the apple's framework and getting the crashlog information, decoding stack traces, even handling out-of-memory cases. All the comments by #nupark hold very much true: We spend countless hours on making it works seamlessly - thread-safeness, making sure that we can do the job of saving everything within the time required by Apple's framework before your app get finally killed, getting stack trace from out-of-memory case (that one was really difficult). The same for android - we've done some clever tricks there to make sure it's really working fine.
Disclaimer: I am CTO of Polidea, company which is behind apphance and co-creator of the solution.
There are a bunch of (SAAS) E2E solutions that you may be very happy to know.
Very very simple to integrate into your application
Have Fun...
crashlytics (Free and my preferred)
hockeyapp
bugSense
Crittercism
In our days you may use the built-in crash reports (iOS & Android)
iOS (Itunes connect) - Viewing Crash Reports
Understanding Crash Reports
on iPhone OS
Reading Android Market Crash Reports
I was working on something for a client today when I found a way to break some functionality in our program.
(The code is really legacy code, it's been in development for about 10 years and I've only been working here for about a year.)
It didn't cause an error, or cause the program to crash, but if a user was using the program and duplicated the behavior I'm pretty sure they'd be holding up their "WTF?" flag.
In our program we have named fields (textboxes) and static text (labels) that can be linked with the textboxes. When the textbox is not filled in the label(s) that were linked to them disappear.
The functionality that I broke was, when you change the name of a textbox that already has one label or more linked to it, and save the file, without re-associating the one or more labels associated with the textbox, the formerly-associated labels appear when the textbox is blank.
Now my thinking on the matter is that a simple observer pattern could have solved this problem in the first place, but then I didn't write the code.
I was thinking that if I could dig up more situations like this with the guys in my shop, that maybe I could talk them into considering unit testing, decoupling, applying patterns where they are called for and the like.
So for this reason I was wondering if anyone had any tips for finding broken (but not error causing) functionality in any sort of app (web-based, desktop, etc...)
For an app to fail usability, it has to have a defined set of expected behaviors.
"Is this textbox SUPPOSED to do nothing when the enter key is pressed?" Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I've seen apps where a tester/reviewer reports something that they ASSUME should work another way, when in actuality the client specifically asked that they DON'T want the form submitted on a return key press, but only a submit button click.
So basically you have to define proper behaviour before you can determine incorrect behavior.
Hire some testers.
If it has an interface, then one of my favorite unconventional test is putting 5-10 year old children in front of it. You'd be surprised what they can come up with (especially the younger ones). While this may sound like a joke, it isn't -- it really works, because children don't have the mindset of only going through "mindset" paths.
And yeah, children are the experts in "breaking things" xP.
Code inspections, i.e. reading the source code: if you had taken time to read/inspect the source code, looking for "smells" or even just looking for code whose behaviour you don't immediately understand and agree with, you might have been holding up your "WTF?" flag too.
Test, test, test.
Do unexpected things. Start doing one task and switch another to see if anything goes haywire. Use the back button when you're not supposed to. Open it in two windows. Let it time out.
Test in all browsers, especially IE.
You can find database connections/sessions aren't released by:
working out the minimum number of connections you need to do something
setting resource limits to that minimum number
ensuring one "run" of the scenario that should use exactly that number (and release it afterwards)
then run it again a few times... do you run out of connections?
I used to work in a company where programmers regularly used to forget to de-allocate db connections. The standard answer was to reduce the resource to a minimum to see if there's a leak - and to try to work out where it is by restarting the system and running different scenarios repeatedly.
The first hour of code review, with the first reviewer, will do the most to find quality problems. But here's the thing: You don't need to convince people of quality problems. You need to convince them of the value of fixing bugs, and of rewriting only when the present quality absolutely justifies it.
I've dealt with some seriously bad code in my time. But you can't just rewrite. You need a spec before you can even tell if the rewrite is an improvement.
Sometimes, you have to infer the spec from the code and then check it against some human somewhere. But by the time you've done that, you understand the code as written and are now better prepared to repair than to rewrite -- most of the time.
Repair proceeds by a process of small behavior-preserving modifications that render the spec more clear in the code. Then, when you find something that looks wrong, you don't just change it. You ask around until you find the person responsible for that decision, and you get them to show you where in the spec it says that behavior X is correct. (This conversation can take many forms.) If you're lucky, they'll tell you that behavior X is in fact incorrect, and then you've earned your pay.
assert()
Also unit testing with coverage analysis.
This is particular to the Visual Studio IDE, although it probably also applies to others:
During testing, always at some point run in the debugger with "Break when an exception is thrown" turned on.
This can often help expose exceptions which are incorrectly being silently caught and which represent bugs, but otherwise may not be evident.
Code reviews should always also include reviews of the unit test code.
The problem is that with ad-hoc testing it's impossible to know how much or how well a developer has tested their code. So, you're at the mercy of different developers definition of the word "done".
If you include reviews of the unit test code at the same time you review the production code you should have a good idea of whether the code is really complete; in that "complete" includes "tested". Not just "Hey, I'll throw it over the wall to the testers!".
I have this Perl software that is supposed to run 24/7. It keeps open a connection to an IMAP server, checks for new mail and then classifies new messages.
Now I have a user that is hibernating his XP laptop every once in a while. When this happens, the connection to the server fails and an exception is triggered. The calling code usually catches that exception and tries to reconnect. But in this case, it seems that Windows (or Perl?) is catching the exception and delivering it to the user via a message box.
Anyone know how I can prevent that kind of wtf? Could my code catch a "system-is-about-to-hibernate" signal?
To clear up some points you already raised:
I have no problem with users hibernating their machines. I just need to find a way to deal with that.
The Perl module in question does throw an exception. It does something like "die 'foo bar'. Although the application is completely browser based and doesn't use anything like Wx or Tk, the user gets a message box titled "poll_timer". The content of that message box is exactly the contents of $# ('foo bar' in this example).
The application is compiled into an executable using perlapp. The documentation doesn't mention anything about exception handling, though.
I think that you're dealing with an OS-level exception, not something thrown from Perl. The relevant Perl module is making a call to something in a DLL (I presume), and the exception is getting thrown. Your best bet would be to boil this down to a simple, replicable test case that triggers the exception (you might have to do a lot of hibernating and waking the machines involved for this process). Then, send this information to the module developer and ask them if they can come up with a means of catching this exception in a way that is more useful for you.
If the module developer can't or won't help, then you'll probably wind up needing to use the Perl debugger to debug into the module's code and see exactly what is going on, and see if there is a way you can change the module yourself to catch and deal with the exception.
It's difficult to offer intelligent suggestions without seeing relevant bits of code. If you're getting a dialog box with an exception message the program is most likely using either the Tk or wxPerl GUI library, which may complicate things a bit. With that said, my guess would be that it would be pretty easy to modify the exception handling in the program by wrapping the failure point in an eval block and testing $# after the call. If $# contains an error message indicating connection failure, then re-establish the connection and go on your way.
Your user is not the exception but rather the rule. My laptop is hibernated between work and home. At work, it is on on DHCP network; at home, it is on another altogether. Most programs continue to work despite a confusing multiplicity of IP addresses (VMWare, VPN, plain old connection via NAT router). Those that don't (AT&T Net Client, for the VPN - unused in the office, necessary at home or on the road) recognize the disconnect at hibernate time (AT&T Net Client holds up the StandBy/Hibernate process until it has disconnected), and I re-establish the connection if appropriate when the machine wakes up. At airports, I use the local WiFi (more DHCP) but turn of the wireless altogether (one physical switch) before boarding the plane.
So, you need to find out how to learn that the machine is going into StandBy or Hibernation mode for your software to be usable. What I don't have, I'm sorry to say, is a recipe for what you need to do.
Some work with Google suggests that ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is part of the solution (Microsoft). APM (Advanced Power Management) may also be relevant.
I've found a hack to avoid modal system dialog boxes for hard errors (e.g. "encountered and exception and needs to close"). I don't know if the same trick will work for this kind of error you're describing, but you could give it a try.
See: Avoiding the “encountered a problem and needs to close” dialog on Windows
In short, set the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows\ErrorMode
registry key to the value “2″.