UI stack trace is truncated

Description

When the UI experiences an error, and the user follows the link to a stack trace, the information is always incomplete because the trace is truncated. For support, this causes extra cycles to request log files to review.

We could improve support response if the trace were complete, not in 100% of the cases, but in many.

Acceptance / Success Criteria

None

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Activity

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Patrick Schweizer August 22, 2018 at 2:56 PM

As per discussion in the weekly scrum call (2018-08-22) we changed the requirement to:

have a opennms.property to define if a (full) stack trace is shown, default is false
if false: no stacktrace is shown to any user
if true: a full stacktrace is shown to all users (there is no special treatments of admins)

reasons for this decision:

truncated stack trace doesn't contain enough useful information but is confusing
we have a simpler code when giving this binary option with no special treatment for admins (admin role is not available via http request in error pages)

Patrick Schweizer August 17, 2018 at 6:39 PM

PR: https://github.com/OpenNMS/opennms/pull/2121

Patrick Schweizer August 14, 2018 at 1:35 AM

Talking to and we agreed on the following:

users with admin rights can see the full stack trace
the old behavior (only show truncated stack trace) can be restored via a opennms.properties entry

Seth Leger April 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM

The stack trace works this way to prevent users from seeing potentially sensitive information (passwords, community strings, etc) that is in a database exception. This prevents normal users from inducing exceptions to see passwords stored by OpenNMS admins in the config files, database, etc.

We should show the entire stack trace for admin users since they will likely already have access to the sensitive information in the config files.

Other ideas:

Store the latest exceptions to a file that can be emailed to support. This protects the content since filesystem access is required.
Queue the latest 5 - 10 exceptions in a list that can be browsed/copied easily in the UI.