capturing errors?

[Alex]

What's the best way to capture error messages without it crashing your
whole app or console session?

For example, if I try to post to an account where I don't have the
correct username or password, my app crashes as follows:
...client/base.rb:39:in `raise_rest_error': Unauthorized
(Twitter::RESTError)

I'd appreciate your help.

Thanks.

[S Potter]

Hi Alex,

You will need to handle the exceptions that are raised by the API. If
you are new to Ruby you should refer to the following Ruby exception
handling documentation:
http://ruby.activeventure.com/programmingruby/book/tut_exceptions.html

For example, you might do something like this around authenticated
calls to the Twitter::Client object you create:

begin
client.status(:post, "Jane Eyre rocks!")
rescue Twitter::RESTError => re
puts re.inspect
# try to resolve error by inspecting the code of the RESTError or something
end

Of course, you can create a helper method that takes a block that will
clean up after common errors, so you do not need to open up
begin/rescue blocks all the time in your code. Something roughly
like:

def twitter_block(&block)
begin

rescue Twitter::RESTError => re
case re.code
when '400'
# usually means you made too many API calls in a time period and
Twitter.com blocked you, so report that appropriately to your
end-users
when '503'
# means that Twitter.com is down
when '401'
# means you have the wrong credentials - check your login/password combo
when '403'
# means you are trying to do something that Twitter.com will not allow
# e.g. direct messaging a user that isn't your friend or something
end
end
end

HTH,
Susan

[S Potter]

Sorry I forgot one line, so it doesn't make sense as previously sent.
Below is the corrected code:

> def twitter_block(&block)
> begin
> block.call if block_given? # line that was added to make sense

> rescue Twitter::RESTError => re
> case re.code
> when '400'
> # usually means you made too many API calls in a time period and
> Twitter.com blocked you, so report that appropriately to your
> end-users
> when '503'
> # means that Twitter.com is down
> when '401'
> # means you have the wrong credentials - check your login/password combo
> when '403'
> # means you are trying to do something that Twitter.com will not allow
> # e.g. direct messaging a user that isn't your friend or something
> end
> end
> end

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