When developing code-based customizations using Verint Community, it is important to manage exceptions and process logging appropriately. Verint Community provides services to enable effective user notification and logging of exceptions and also general process logging.
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Why do I Need to Handle Exceptions/Logging in a Specific Way?
Plugins are .net classes and can throw .net exceptions to identify exceptional issues and there are many solutions to process logging. Verint Community provides support for integrating exception handling and process logging, enabling a consistent error and process handling experience for administrators and community members.
Exception Rendering
When an exception bubbles up from a plugin to a user, either via UI rendering or when handling a REST request, Verint Community will interpret the exception to return an error response to the accessing user. To prevent information disclosure security vulnerabilities, exceptions, by default, are replaced with a generic error message in UI and REST responses.
To enable custom messages to be returned, the thrown exception must implement IUserRenderableException. This interface can be applied to a custom Exception implementation to identify to Verint Community that the exception can provide an appropriate, safe, and ideally translated message to a user. The interface defines one member, GetUserRenderableMessage() which returns a string. The results of this method will be returned through the UI and shown to the user or be placed in the Errors collection of REST responses (depending on how the API, and indirectly the plugin, was accessed).
Exception Logging
Some exceptions are caused by user error, for example, entering "abcd" where a number was expected. Other exceptions may identify a configuration issue. Issues that occur that should be reviewed and corrected are good candidates for logging.
Verint Community includes an exception log (available in Administration > Monitoring > Exceptions) and custom exceptions can be logged there as well by implementing ILoggableException on the Exception being thrown. Any exception that bubbles up to the end-user is reviewed by Verint Community to see if it implements ILoggableException. If it does, the exception is added to the platform's exception log.
ILoggableException requires only a single member to be implemented: Category. The string returned by Category is used within the exception log UI to categorize and filter the list of exceptions in the log.
Process Logging
Sometimes its useful for background processes to log process details not related to exceptions. In this case, plugins can use the EventLog API. The event logs API enables plugins to write logging data to the Verint Community event log (available in Administration > Monitoring > Events). To write an event log entry, use the Write method.