CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Working with external systems (myopenid, payment processors) in productive situation when it does not work (e.g. a specific user cannot login, a payment is left in the pending state) you have very often only a resulting message like: "not allowed to login, call the admin" or a registration is pending. There may be an entry saying contribution record updated successfully (what record, what contact?). Sometimes a backtrace is recorded, but not information is available why it got to that place.

At present (2.1.4) the log does not give a clear picture. Mostly no indication in the message whether it is a information or an error, no reference to a contact_id, contribution_id or anything that tells you how to correlate this message to something you see on the gui.

At present I help myself by writing error statements into the code. This is clearly the worst possible approach to solving problems, but I have no better at hand.

What is really needed:
- constant logging of processes that involve external systems (in my case myopenid, payment processors).
- Separation of logging errors and progress logging (either separate files or markings in each log statement), to make grepping of statements to watch possible.
- configurable setting of depth of logging (for either debugging or for monitoring).
- remove showing backtraces in productive systems to the users (what should he do with it?), logging it is sufficient
- error messages to users need to be translated (what shall a user that speeks only french do with an english error message?)

As people like me are pressed to use the newest version to solve problems or use much needed new functions this is all the more necessary.  I strongly advocate to give this a high priority. This is also to make live for donald lobo easier. I sometimes wonder if he finds any time for live appart work, being innundated by request day and night