Hello Stack Overflow !
A simple question for you : is it possible to embed custom error data into automatically generated iOS crash dumps I get from my users when my app crashed on their device ?
For example : My SQlite database won't operate for some reason (say, the database file is corrupted).. I cannot recover from this error, so I throw an exception, and embed in the exception the detailed sqlite error message. The problem is, the crash dump of the application won't contain the exception message, so it's not easy to know under which conditions the application crashed.
Does anyone know a way to put things into the crash dump report ? Or do you have any other recommended way of reporting production crashes to the developper ?
Thanks !
No, you cannot ad your own data into the crash reports. It is also not possible to access iOS generated crash reports automatically because of the sandbox.
So my suggestion is as follows:
For logging your own data, use Cocoalumberjack. It is much faster than NSLog or other logging frameworks out there and has an option to log your messages into a file. Now when an exception occurs, or whenever else you want to, log that into a file. But if your app crashes right at a point where you add something into a log file, it most likely will be missing, since the app crashed the very same moment.
So its rather impossible to safely catch the exact SQL statement. But the crash report should give you enough information to understand what is happening, with the addition to what you logged of being done before. E.g. you could log the search string used in the SQL way before the SQL is being executed.
In general try not to log too much.
For catching crash report you should nothing else than a solution based on the open source framework PLCrashReporter, which can safely catch crashes, also when you app is already in the app store! Exception catching is not recommended, check this article to see why!
iTunes Connect offers you to view some crash reports too, but it takes up to 2 weeks to see some, but by far not all as e.g. pointed out by the Camera+ developers. So you better use your own solution.
PLCrashReporter will send you standard apple formatted crash reports, ready for symbolication, so you know where the crash happens in your code, including line numbers.
Some solutions based on PLCrashReporter are:
QuincyKit: Open Source client + php server, basic crash grouping, symbolication can be automated from your mac (I am the developer of this)
HockeyApp: Paid service, uses QuincyKit client, advanced crash grouping, symbolication fully done on the server (I am on of the developers of this)
Bugsense: Free service, symbolication announced as premium feature
AppBlade: Paid service, symbolication unknown
Crashlytics: Private beta, unknown features, their solution seems to be based on PLCrashReporter
The proposed solutions either allow sending the data automatically on the next startup or by asking the user if he/she agrees to send.
Disclaimer-as-per-the-faq: I am a developer for AppBlade.
AppBlade allows you to send custom parameters along with symbolicated crash reports as of December 2012.
Check it out! http://blog.appblade.com/news/2012/12/appblade-sdk-update-sessions-and-queues/
Related
I know there are many crash reporting tools available in the market to collect crashes from the real devices. I would like to know how a crash reporting tool really collects its data?. Does it collect a crash report from the operating system once the crashed application launched again? or Does iOS allows the crash reporter to collect the data as soon as the app is crashed?.
It will be really great if somebody can explain what happens after an app is crashed or point me to right place.
System crash logs are located at /private/var/mobile/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/ and (as far as I know) can't be accessed by the app directly. Most crash reporting tools will try to catch crashes and generate their own crash reports which will get stored locally and sent to a server for symbolication and processing.
You can take a look at the source for KSCrash, an open source crash reporting tool, to see how crashes are caught/stored/reported.
If there is a crash for an application, can I capture the crash logs and send it to a server right after the crash. I guess my question really is if the app crashed can I use the network api to send some data to the server.
Lots of services out there to do this... HockeyApp & TestFlight spring to mind.
Update: HockeyApp has just released a Mac Application 'HockeyCoach' to allow you to view crash reports within a native App, with awesome functionality like viewing the source code referenced in the crash log etc...
I highly reccomend you check it out: http://hockeyapp.net/releases/hockeycoach/
Yes, there are several solutions that provide this functionality. One of them that I'm intimately familiar with (and works very well) is Apigee's Mobile Analytics (http://apigee.com/docs/enterprise/content/analyze_apps).
One of the important points for dealing with crash logs is to save a copy of your .dSYM. This is needed to symbolicate the crash log.
Try using Crashlytics. Extremely simple to incorporate into app and is completely free.
That probably sounds a lot worse than it is, but here's my question.
I am dealing with a crash on an actual device, that one of my tester's is using. At the moment, there is no way to discover what is causing the crash. I can not reproduce it on the simulator. However, on the simulator when something crashes I get log info about it in the output window. But I don't want to keep testing with the device connected.
Is it possible to log crash exceptions, etc into a file when things crash. I know certain apps can do it, but I am not sure how?
Any info would be appreciated.
There are generally two ways to do that:
Someone get the tester to send you the crash reports, that iOS created on the device. This is usually too tricky for end users, so the next suggestion works better. That's also why I am not describing how to do that :) But you'll find plenty of documentations on that process.
Integrate a crash reporting library, that catches the crashes and allows you to receive them in various ways. You should not implement your own global crash exception handler, things are just too complex to do it right (even though other people will tell you otherwise). Also crashes caused by exceptions are only one type of crashes.
There are multiple open source libraries out there, the safest one to use is anything based on PLCrashReporter. Most others use private or undocumented iOS APIs, or are not async-safe, which basically means those can destroy app data or make the crash even worse. See this blog post about the topic: http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/crashreporting/Reliable_Crash_Reporting_1.1.20130119.html
The following linked answer shows some of the available options on how to add logging to your app and also various options on how to receive crash reports for test version and also once the app is released: Including custom data into iOS crash dumps
If you're open to using a third party service, I use https://www.crashlytics.com. Makes debugging crashes from user devices painless.
Not sure if that is possible. But what happens is, sometimes our app randomly crashes. We don't know what exactly the problem is. Is there a way for us to get the crash report off user's iphone? By code, or by another app?
Thanks.
You can inject a third party code in your app, which would basically save your crash reports and thereafter you can use them for analysis. The way we do is capture any crash logs and upload them to the app server, which uses the info to display through a user-friendly web Interface (access controlled for admin purposes).
A great open source Crash Reporter library can be found here https://github.com/kstenerud/KSCrash
It's the user who decides from Settings > General > About > Diagnostics & Usage whether to automatically send crash reports or not.
You can also use a third party component to get detailed information about crash events, for example Crittercism.
If you're interested in 3rd party services for crash reporting for iOS it's hard to go past Crashlytics. Very fast crash reporting, simple installation, great response times to queries.
I'd also mention the TestFlight SDK, which is free and easy to use, and allows you to gather crash reports easily from all your testers, and also do remote logging and other stuff. I used it on a location based app I was working on a while ago, and it was very helpful with debugging
I would like to extract crash logs of those users who are using my enterprise app. In case of the App Store apps I can get this information from iTunes connect. Since there is no intervention of App Store in case of Enterprise deployment therefore not sure how to access this information.
Is there any Objective-C API through which I can access the crash logs with the application code and upload them on my server using a web-service?
There is no Objective-C API available to access iOS generated crash reports. The only way to automatically access them, is adding a crash reporting framework to your apps that also catches the crashes and let you send them to a service or your own server.
I highly recommend not engineering your own crash reporting or exception handling mechanism, since it is way too complicated to make it right and not introduce more dangerous problems that could e.g. cause your app users to loose data.
The second part of my answer here lists a few options, contains open source projects, services with open source SDKs and closed source options: iOS crash log catch, debug info.. Catch and send via email to the Dev team
Try using Crashlytics.
Very powerfull. Very pleasant to use.
You can instruct your users to extract the logs from iTunes and send them to you. Take a look at the "Sending Crash Reports to a Developer" section of this document: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Xcode/Conceptual/ios_development_workflow/35-Distributing_Applications/distributing_applications.html