Feature Request: Give customer an "Exception Token" they can provide back to us

[rollbar]

Feature Request: Give customer an "Exception Token" they can provide back to us

[brianr]

Great suggestion. I think we actually already have most of the necessary support for this on the server-side, so it's just a matter of implementing this in the gem. Making no changes to the existing server-side code, the following implementation is possible:

1. a uuid will be generated when the payload is build
2. the uuid will be saved to the request environment (or some other request-local storage)
3. in your error pages, grab that uuid and show it to the user
4. you can then visit https://ratchet.io/item/uuid/?uuid=uuidgoeshere, which will redirect you to the Item detail page for that item, or https://ratchet.io/instance/uuid/?uuid=uuidgoeshere, which will redirect you to the Instance detail page for that instance.

How close is that to what you have in mind? Any improvements? I can think of a couple:

• more user-friendly identifiers (i.e. using a string of random words instead of a random 36-character string)
• automagically include the uuid in the default rails error template

Details about what already exists

The API currently supports a uuid param as part of the item payloads. It's used by our Django and Pyramid libraries to include a "View in Ratchet" link in the development 500 error templates.

Uuids are 36-character strings that should be random and unique across the entire Ratchet system. In the Python libraries, we're using uuid.uuid4(). Looks like we can use @assaf's uuid gem here.

[mipearson]

Awesome! Glad to see that there's already support for it on the SS. I was thinking about overriding the default 500 template as part of the gem, but one step at a time ..

[brianr]

Update on this... I've pushed a new version of the gem (0.5.1) that saves the exception uuid in env['ratchetio.exception_uuid']. If you have custom error pages with e.g. Goalie, you can use it like so:

Please provide this error ID when contacting support: <%= request.env['ratchetio.exception_uuid'] %>

I wanted to start with this, but I suppose it would be possible to patch this into the default error pages. Would you want/use that?

[mipearson]

Huh, hadn't heard of Goalie, will need to check it out.

Might give it a go - thanks for that. I think that providing the UUID and letting the user decide what to do with it is better than patching the default error pages.

[brianr]

Closing this out as it does exist, in the form described in the comment above. (The uuid is saved in env['rollbar.exception_uuid']). We may make this fancier, but that can be a separate issue.

Thanks for the suggestion @mipearson!