Debugging provisioning issues: looking up app ids?

[Stefano J. Attardi]

Hello,

it seems to me it's harder than it should be to debug provisioning
errors.

I see two main problems:

1. users get no indication whatsoever about what went wrong, but
simply a generic "could not create resource" error

2. when users report the problem, we can typically get the app name,
but unfortunately there is no way to match that with our system and
our logs, because everything is based on the app id, not the app name.

Questions:

1. Can you give us a way to look up an app id based on an app name?
The list of users and the new Get App Info call don't do the trick
because they only work for apps that have already been successfully
provisioned.

2. Is there any plan to give users more detailed error reports, or
perhaps even better, notify us add-on providers when a provisioning
call fails?

Thanks,
Stefano J. Attardi

designer & web developer
cloudant.com

[Stefano J Attardi]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Peter van Hardenberg <p...@pvh.ca> wrote:
> Heyo,
> you can make a get call to the callback URL to get a JSON block with the
> user's app name. Completely life-saving, and makes your dashboard way more
> informative!

Isn't the api.heroku.com/vendor/apps/1234 call based on the app id? My
problem is the opposite, I have the app name, and I need to get the
app id.

I can't simply look up all the app names of all the app ids we have in
our system because, in case of a failed provision call, the app id is
not in our system at all.

Cheers,

[Peter van Hardenberg]

Heyo,

you can make a get call to the callback URL to get a JSON block with the user's app name. Completely life-saving, and makes your dashboard way more informative!

Peter

--
Peter van Hardenberg
San Francisco, California
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." -- Kurt Vonnegut

[Morten Bagai]

Stefano,

It's actually not the app id. It's the provider id that you assigned when creating the resources. You should (hopefully) have that. In practice, a lot of providers use the heroku app identifier (app...@heroku.com) as the id, but you don't have to. We store the id you return to us on our side, so we can look up the info based on your id.

-M

[Peter van Hardenberg]

Ah, I cache the app name and owner email on the addon record internally.

-p

[Stefano J Attardi]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 3:04 PM, Morten Bagai <mor...@heroku.com> wrote:
> It's actually not the app id. It's the provider id that you assigned when creating the resources. You should (hopefully) have that. In practice, a lot of providers use the heroku app identifier (app...@heroku.com) as the id, but you don't have to. We store the id you return to us on our side, so we can look up the info based on your id.

Thanks Morten, that's actually what we do as well (i.e. provider id ==
heroku app id). That doesn't answer my question though regarding apps
that haven't been successfully provisioned yet.

Any way I can get the ID of those if I know their name?

[Morten Bagai]

Currently not. I agree we should have better error reporting for this, and we will investigate how to provide that.

-m