[Maypole-dev] error handling

From: Dave Howorth (Dave.Howorth at acm.org)
Date: Tue Dec 28 2004 - 14:06:43 GMT


I'm trying to get to grips with Maypole's error handling.

There are many circumstances detected in handler_guts where the handler
just returns the status code -1 without calling send_output. This
results in the user seeing an HTTP 500 Server Error page, which I
believe is inappropriate for circumstances such as a plain page not
being found, or an authorization failure, or in fact any problem caused
by inappropriate input from the browser that Maypole has been able to
detect.

This happens with CGI, I don't know how it behaves in mod_perl?

One can argue that Maypole doesn't know what you want to do so it
doesn't guess :) but I feel it ought to at least return a sensible HTTP
response code to the browser, rather than just claiming to have died!
Certainly if I'm browsing and get a 500 from a site, it doesn't inspire
me with confidence in the website's authors. IMHO, it would also be
sensible to have some default factory templates for these cases (403,
404 etc) that users could then easily replace by adding custom templates.

Have I missed something or do other people see the same?

My current plan is to spend some time investigating and hopefully come
up with (a) some patches and (b) a section for the docs that explains
error handling.

Cheers, Dave

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