#11 Improve Error Messages / Reporting

[Charles Foster]

Whilst developing in anger using XMLSH, it becomes very apparent that when commands cause an error / exception that the message's are being caught and not displayed to the user.

You spend lots of time trying to "guess" what the error actually is.

For instance, one example would be while trying to insert content into MarkLogic via ml:put I get lots of:

Exception submitting data
Exception submitting data
Exception submitting data
...

There is no error message in the MarkLogic ErrorLog.txt or XDBC AccessLog

I am not just talking about ml:put having very none-descriptive error messages, I am talking most commands having none-descriptive error messages when things go wrong, sometimes to the point of something completely meaningless.

I do care about XMLSH ... if I didn't, I wouldn't be spending my time writing this stuff.

[David Lee]

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
I agree the messaging needs improvement. Have you ever looked at xmlsh.log ? This contains the full exception traces for most things and is highly useful. Buy default this is located at $HOME/xmlsh.log

[Charles Foster]

That's good to know, yes I can see the stack traces now - that's very helpful to me.

I still think the error messages should be more descriptive though. Perhaps even going so far as producing the entire stack trace as the XMLSH output.

[David Lee]

I used to print the entire stack trace to stderr but I found that usually its way too much information, sometimes 100 or even 1000 lines. And often the real useful bits is burried deep in it, not just the first or last line.

Definitely am open to suggestion as how to improve this. FYI you can add your own log4j file which forces all log output to the console. But I dont think that is a good thing usually.

[David Lee]

In latest checkin (not yet relased but in SVN) both the shell general errors and marklogic extension errors now print the entire chain of CausedBy messages for every exception.
As a workaround the xmlsh.log file always contains the full stack trace (by default in $HOME/xmlsh..log)