Exception reporting frameworks for Cocoa

Question

Hi,

Are there any frameworks that capture and report exceptions? I need something that catches any exceptions or errors caused by my program while its being used by a non-technical user and then to email it to me. Do you handle this on your own projects? Did you roll your own solution or is there an off the shelf solution?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Well, there is @throw with NSException, e.g.:

@throw [NSException exceptionWithName:@"xxx" reason:@"yyy" userInfo:nil];

and [NSException raise:], see adc and this question.

Answer 2

Exceptions are typically used in Cocoa for denoting programmer error as opposed to something going "oops" at runtime.

The classic example of the former: An Array out of bounds exception occurs if you tried accessing the 50th element of a 10 element NSArray. This is programmer error as you should not let this happen.

The classic example of the latter: You try to read in a file from disk but the file is missing. This is not an exceptional case, it's somewhat common for file read operations to fail, and thus an exception should not be thrown (it's your job as a Cocoa developer to recover from this gracefully, and it's not too difficult to do so).

Keep this in mind when using Exceptions in Cocoa, especially if they are going to be user-facing.

Answer 3

This may not be exactly what you are looking for, but if you use Fogbugz, there is a tool called Bugzscout that will create a ticket from the application. You could tie it into to your exception and give the user an opportunity to create a ticket on the exception:

http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/docs/70/topics/customers/BugzScout.html

Answer 4

Found the answer in this thread.