I'm trying to create an automated error reporting tool for our Java desktop app. the idea is to make it as easy as possible for customers to send us error reports whenever our application crashes.
Using the Desktop.mail API, I am able to craft messages that can be easily edited and sent from our users, but I'm running into system limitations on several platforms (notably Windows 7 and MS Outlook, which most customers are using)
When I run the example code below, you'll notice that the email message that is displayed truncates the included stack trace. I believe this has something to do with a maximum length of either command lines or URIs in the underlying systems.
Is there a better way to craft an email from an error report that is not subject to this limitation?
import java.awt.Desktop;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.net.URI;
import java.net.URLEncoder;
public class Scratchpad {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
try {
generateLongStackTrace();
} catch (Error e) {
URI uri = createMailURI(e);
// this will correctly pop up the system email client, but it will truncate the message
// after about 2K of data (this seems system dependent)
Desktop.getDesktop().mail(uri);
}
}
// Will eventually generate a really long stack overflow error
public static void generateLongStackTrace() throws Exception {
generateLongStackTrace();
}
public static URI createMailURI(Error e) throws Exception {
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
builder.append("mailto:foo@example.com?body=");
// encodes the stack trace in a mailto URI friendly form
String encodedStackTrace = URLEncoder.encode(dumpToString(e), "utf-8").replace("+", "%20");
builder.append(encodedStackTrace);
return new URI(builder.toString());
}
// Dumps the offending stack trace into a string object.
public static String dumpToString(Error e) {
StringWriter sWriter = new StringWriter();
PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(sWriter);
e.printStackTrace(writer);
writer.flush();
return sWriter.toString();
}
}
