Wednesday, 25 September 2013

Error Handling in JSP

Error Handling in JSP


  • Basically what kind of errors can expect in jsp page?
  • We know that jsp is nothing but a html with java so tipically you would get some java type errors and some html type errors in jsp page
  • Lets we talk about java type errors:






Errors in java code in scriptlets:


  • here every one writes certain java logic or java code in jsp page in terms of scriptlets , expressions , declarations and all those stuff. But most of the time if at all writing any kind of business logic in your jsp page will be writing in a scriptlet.
  • Scriptlet is the place where most of your java programming errors in a jsp page would reside and how do you handle these errors? We can write your basic system print statements to track your different variables modifying all these but if at all having your huge amount of code in your jsp page , huge amount of java code in your jsp page and not able to figure of the issue, then it is highly recommended to write the code in side the try ..catch block and the even you will sup-rise to figure out the defects with minutes when you use the try/catch block in jsp page.
  • And most of these errors occur at run time so basically when you are testing you probably would not come across certain scenarios which result in these errors and suddenly out of the blue they pop out the no where .
  • So these are typically difficult to identify but there is one type of error which is easy to identify and those are the html type errors


Errors in Html





  • we know that we got term of html scripting elements in html, we have different element html <body>, <table> and all those things.
  • So you might by mistake write element name incorrectly, or forget to close some element or something like that so those kind of small html issues could occur in jsp page. And you will find out a html error as soon as you the moment you launch your page so if at all any html errors in the jsp page when you launch your page , it is not going to show up properly and that is the problem where we can immediately identify that there was some error in html and you can fix that error.
  • So these are very easy to figure out and they can be caught during testing
1Q: Why is error handling so important in JSPs?


Ans:
We know that a JSP is nothing but a html and this is what the end users sees right, so that means the end user entire world the jsp page is the face of your web application. So the end user really does not care what kind of complex algorithms you are using in the in the back. He does not really be care what kind of logic is used in the back end, the only thing the end user is worried about is what he sees on the page? whatever there on the page, end user likes it, whatever is there on the screen, the end user does not like it? Whatever business logic is write on the back-end is of no use goes in vain, so that is the reason why error handling in JSP pages extremely important.


......................................................---------------------------------------
Lets just have a look at two different error pages which are shown and lets see which one is better than that one?


1. Error page 1.
  1. Error page 1:

so the user has requested the page and the request could not be processed because there was some error but the system has given some very beautiful error message page saying that we are sorry the page is not available and so..and so....


How do you achieve it to display the error message 1?
  • Error pages comes to the rescue
<%@page isErrorPage=”true” %>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Error Page</title>
<head>
<body>
We are sorry, the page you are trying to access is currently not available .
Please try after some time .
</body>
</html>


  • error pages are nothing but simple jsp pages but small difference
  • And the only difference is you have this page directive attribute(ie. IsErrorPage and you said that this attribute is “true”
  • So as soon as iserrorPage attribute is “true” the page directive jsp page become some error page now. And it can be used an error page.
  • This error page which would be showing to the end client
  • So we know that to show that some fancy error page to the client whenever there is an error and we also developed error page now
  • But how do you display this error page to the end user? , the end user actually requested for some other page we did not request for this page, so how do you actually submit this page to the user?


We can do it in two ways:

  1. specify your error page in your main page
  2. specify your error page in web.xml




1. Specify your error page in your main page:




<%@page errorPage=”errPage.jsp”%>
<html>
<head>
<title>This is the main page</title>
</head>
<body>
.......................
..........................
...........................
//ERROR CODE GOES HERE


.............................
...........................
</body>
</html>


  • So whenever an error is in my jsp page , I want to redirect it into error page which I just coded now and show that beautiful message to the end user. How do I do that ? I do that errorPage attribute on the page directive.
  • So whenever there is a error in this jsp page the jsp engine is going to look at the page directive and see if there is any error page defined(errorPage=”errPage.jsp”). And if there is any error page is defined, then it is going to redirect to the this error page ex: errPage.jsp.
  • So whenever there is an error jsp page I'm redirected to this error page and that error page is going to the end user which is a brief description of the error message to the end user.




2. specify error page In web.xml






  • Now lets do that based on error I want to redirect the user to different error pages so if the page is not found I will display some error message to the user and there is some kind of null pointer exception or something like that I will display some other page to the end user . How can you do that you can do that, using the web.xml
<web-app>
................
................
<error-page>
<exception-type>com.a.myExp</exception-type>
<location>/error.jsp</location>
</error-page>






<error-page>
<error-code> 404</error-code>
<location>/errorServlet</location>
</error-page>






.......................
......................
</web-app>



  • So you can define error page even in web.xml
  • So within the <error- page > element , we write an <exception-type> and say that whenever there is an exception of type myExp in one the jsp page I want to redirect it to the this error page I.e error.jsp
  • And we also alternative say whenver there is an error code 404, I want to redirect it this error page (I.e error.jsp)
  • Here again we would have noticed that two ways I can define this, 1. using <exception-type> 2. using the <error-code>

2. error page number 2:



t simply displayes the 404 error message, error message which does not give any information so you do not really know this page available at all with this website down or something is wrong with the code or . So really dont have any idea of is happening behind this in this scenario 2 .


but in Scenario 1 system has displayed clearly neat message saying the reason for the error come back .


  • So end user point of view error page 1 is far more better than the error page 2 so you should give a user brief description of an error message of why that error has happened or ask them to come back of try after some time or something like that instead of just throwing 404 error page can not be displayed error message .
How do you achieve it to display the error message 1?


<%@page isErrorPage=”true” %>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Error Page</title>
<head>
<body>
We are sorry, the page you are trying to access is currently not available .
Please try after some time .
</body>
</html>


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