027 Advanced Error Handling Strategies for ColdFusion, Javascript and SQL with Mary Jo Sminkey

Mary Jo Sminkey talks about “Advanced Error Handling Strategies for ColdFusion, Javascript and SQL” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michael Smith.

She is also one of the speakers at the CFObjective Conference. She will be covering not just CF but JS/Ajax and SQL Server error logging and strategies for debugging errors on live sites. Developers should come away from this talk with lots of ideas for both custom code they can add to their sites as well a variety of open source and 3rd party solutions for error logging and use site analytics to track and fix issues on their live sites. Blog articles expanding on the information presented in this talk will also be published concurrent with the conference.

Episode highlights

Why every CFer should be doing error logging
CF error logging
Global Error Handler
Capturing Different Scopes
Preventing unwieldy numbers of error emails
Logging to capture larger amounts of data vs. emailing all errors
Tracking User Actions
Per user history of pages accessed held in session scope
Shopping cart contents
User account info
JS/Ajax error logging
Ajax tracker in user session
Track Ajax request parameters
Log Ajax response and/or success
SQL Server error logging
Stored procedures errors
Log table to log SP params and info
Unexpected NULL values
Strategies for debugging errors on live sites
Variety of open source and 3rd party solutions for error logging
Using site analytics to track and fix issues on their live sites
404 errors
301 redirects
Log events in analytics
Search results events
Full Stack Application performance management tools
Full user interactions tracking
Reporting on performance too
All in one place
Why are you proud to use CF?
WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?
More developer outreach to bring in new developers – we are still developing it, cool new features
What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

Mentioned in this episode

– Mary Jo’s full custom CF error handler
– Only emailing on unique errors
– Bugsnag https://www.bugsnag.com/ – with REST API collector, Javascript collector, subscribe to bug, track as fixed, renotify if it comes back, bug high level alerts, searchable by customer IP
BuglogHQ https://github.com/oarevalo/BugLogHQ – open source CF tool
FusionReactor https://www.fusion-reactor.com/ for slow CF pages and SQL queries
Source maps for minified production JS code
CodeKit (for Mac) https://codekitapp.com/
Jenkins build server https://jenkins.io/
JSON structure saved to server and displayed with JSON viewer http://www.json.org/
– Solr search http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
– Browser Hawk https://www.cyscape.com/
– CFLOG https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/cfml-reference/coldfusion-tags/tags-j-l/cflog.html
– Logbox https://www.logbox.co.za/
– Dynatrace https://www.dynatrace.com/
– Cisco Appdynamics https://www.appdynamics.com/