Returning custom error messages in ActionWebService

Rails
1

I want to return my own error messages from an API instead of letting
the client see the stack trace. I’m returning a custom structure so I
guess I could just put a member in that structure for the error
message, although that seems like kind of a hack. Any suggestions?

Chris

2

I answered my own question sort of. I just created a top level struct
that I wrap everything else into that has members for error messags,
then make sure I have a rescue clause at the end of every method.

3

On 7/29/06, snacktime [email protected] wrote:

I answered my own question sort of. I just created a top level struct
that I wrap everything else into that has members for error messags,
then make sure I have a rescue clause at the end of every method.

Ok I spoke too soon. That works in the api methods but not in the
invocation filters. I could call the filter from each method but
that’s kind of a hack. The invocation filters will show part of the
stack trace if you return false, which just isn’t acceptable for a lot
of applications. Any ideas?

4

On 7/29/06, snacktime [email protected] wrote:

Ok after doing some investigating I found out you can set this:

MyController.web_service_exception_reporting = false

However when you do that then the exception message sent to the client
makes soap4r croak with this message. I have no idea if it’s a bug in
ActionWebService or soap4r.

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/soap/mapping/mapping.rb:106:in
fault2exception': undefined method +’ for nil:NilClass
(NoMethodError)

It also just sends a generic error message instead of the custom
message I want returned to the client. Also, I can’t just call the
before_invocation filter from the api method because it does it’s
eager loading of associations before I can run my filter, and I happen
to be using a postgresql set search_path in the filter, which has to
be set before any other database queries.