[HACKYSTAT-DEV-L] New StackTrace logging support

[Aaron Kagawa]

Hey Guys,

In trying to figure out the error in DailyProjectUnitTest, I thought it would be a good idea to log the stack trace. We've talked about this issue a couple of weeks ago in a code review. The problem is that we all like to use Throwable.printStackTrace because it provides detailed information about the exception. However, the printStackTrace prints only to console and not to the log. To log the stack trace we would have to use the Throwable.getStackTrace, but that is a little hard to deal with.

I've came up with this simple solution. Does this implementation satisfy other developers' needs?

  /**
   * Converts the Throwable.getStackTrace to a String representation for logging. This method
   *    tries create a String that imitates the Throwable.printStackTrace as much as possible.
   * @param throwable The Throwable exception.
   * @param stackTrace An array of stack trace elements.
   * @return A String containing the StackTrace.
   */
  public String convertStackTraceToString(Throwable throwable, StackTraceElement[] stackTrace) {
    StringBuffer stackTraceStringBuffer = new StringBuffer();
    stackTraceStringBuffer.append(throwable);
    for (int i = 0; i < stackTrace.length; i++) {
      StackTraceElement element = stackTrace[i];
      stackTraceStringBuffer.append( "\n at " + element.toString());
    }
    return stackTraceStringBuffer.toString();
  }

Clients should do something like:

    String stackTrace = serverProperties.convertStackTraceToString(e, e.getStackTrace());
    logger.info(stackTrace);

thanks, aaron