[samigo-team] Not swallowing DB errors (SAM-2080)

[David Horwitz]

There a couple of issues here:

1) Should a user continue with a test believing all is OK when it isn't?

2) The best way to report this for to admins for action

One of the support teams reasons for wanting this as an alert on the UI is at least then they can inform the invigilator ("Look something when wrong here"). If this could do the email alert in the background then that would be a +1 for me as we process those automatically. The difficulty with log only is we often only hear of this some time after the fact that make log mining tricky (logs may have rotated + the support cost of tracking down which app server the user was on etc)

D




On Mon, 2013-03-18 at 08:53 -0400, Aaron Zeckoski wrote:


Why not just error log them (or even better, log and email an admin)?
Then you don't have the security risk/ugliness of a stacktrace on
screen but still have the logs available to review later.
-AZ


On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 8:46 AM, David Horwitz <david.horwitz at uct.ac.za<mailto:david.horwitz at uct.ac.za>> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I mailed the list last week about SAM-2080 (DAO errors are swallowed) and
> not reported to the user or via fault logging.  At that point it was mainly
> a theoretical error, in the interim we
> have had a student claim to have had 2 answers in a test not be recorded.
> Under the circumstances its very hard for us to know the true case.
>
> I've attached a patch to SAM-2080 that modified most of the DOA save methods
> in AssesmentGradingQueries to throw a newly defined
> SamigoDataAccessException. GradingService then rethrows these as
> RuntimeExceptions. This causes an error saving a student answer to get a
> portal error report - not ideal but at least the error isn't lost.
>
> The desired behavior (in consultation with our support team) would be for
> the student to stay on the page they where trying to submit with an error
> message.
>
> What are peoples thoughts on this?
>
> D
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