developer.rteReports

Purpose: Describe RTE reporting.

Introduction

RTE (Runtime Exception) reporting has proved a very effective way to maintain Autoplot. When users hit a runtime exception, they can submit a report that provides Autoplot developers with information about the error.

How is the report generated

The RTE report is an XML document that is uploaded to a server, which is presently http://papco.org/RTEReceiver/LargeUpload.jsp. Some servers don't allow posts, so the user may save the report to a file that is sent via email.

What is recorded

applicationId= autoplot
user comments, which are free text entered by the user to describe the bug.
userName, guessed from java properties
email, if the user provides
the current URI autoplot has in the focus bar
buildinfos, which are tags that can be used to recover the source. (Not tested.)
platform info, including: java.version, java,vendor, os.name, os.arch, os.version, runtime.freeMemory, etc.
exception that raised the dialog, including the stack trace
.vap file of the current state
states, which are undo information showing how they got there
screenshot, optional.

How to use this report

get the screenshot

The screenshot is encoded with uuencode, and the command uudeview is useful:

unix> uudeview rte_0751346092_20120808_212159_usern.xml
Loaded from rte_0751346092_20120808_212159_usern.xml: '' (UNKNOWN.001):  part -1   Base64                                                                      
Found 'UNKNOWN.001' State 16 Base64 Parts 1 OK
unix> mv UNKNOWN.001 UNKNOWN.001.png
unix> eog UNKNOWN.001.png

load the vap

The vap file within the report can be loaded by renamimg the exception report and loading it:

unix> cp rte_0751346092_20120808_212159_usern.xml rte_0751346092_20120808_212159_usern.xml.vap

and then in autoplot load this vap. This works because the vap-loading code looks for exception report files and handles them specially. Also you can prefix the URL with "vapfile:" to force load of a resource as a vap file.