Open Stack

The reason the architecture is the way it is in Horizon right now is because historically most projects have sent messages that are either raw tracebacks (not appropriate for a popup error display at all), extremely detailed/technical reports containing multiple resource IDs that are not human-parseable, or otherwise unhelpful error strings.

Basically, until there is a concerted effort on the part of each and every service to be better about returning human-parseable error messages from the APIs, the default should be to show a generic error message unless we know that the API is trusted to return appropriate responses. Opt-in, not opt-out.

There are basically two ways to proceed right now: invest a ton of work-hours in Horizon figuring out a good message for each poor response returned from each API call, or invest a ton of work-hours in the projects themselves to improve the error responses for human consumption.

As a third option that does not ultimately reduce the need for the work described above, you could display the generic message and have an option attached to the generic message that says "See the raw API response (advanced)" or something like that which would pop up a window that had the actual error response from the API. This would probably need to be configurable in the settings since many deployers still wouldn't want regular users exposed to some of the information that's returned in those error responses.

Personally I favor investing the energy in improving the responses sent back from the APIs. It'd go a long way towards improving the global user experience of OpenStack.

     - Gabriel

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Musso, Veronica A [mailto:veronica.a.musso at intel.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 13, 2014 12:54 PM
> To: openstack at lists.openstack.org
> Cc: Musso, Veronica A
> Subject: [Openstack] [Horizon and Nova] Inclusion of exception message to
> UI error
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Due this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/horizon/+bug/1210540 and its fix
> proposal: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/62026, I would like to discuss the
> inclusion of Nova's exception messages in the Horizon's dashboard.
> nova/compute/api.py functions throws exceptions with a translatable
> messages, and they are caught by  "handle" function in
> horizon/tables/actions.py. This function ignores the exception message and
> displays a general one.
> The idea is to modify "handle" function to show the exception messages to
> the users. The advantage is to have a better idea of the failure reason
> without reviewing logs, helping the end users with the troubleshooting. On
> the other hand, the disadvantage is it may lead to information disclosure or
> not translatable messages (if functions sending the exception do not
> translate the messages).
> 
> Then, what is the best approach to resolved the bug?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Best Regards,
> Verónica Musso
> 
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