> when you start introducing other factors like how to report the errors publicly to a non-technical user, maybe in different languages, or whether to log it or send it who knows where, whether to trace or not, how, how to deal with duplicates or similar errors...
I’ve tried searching for articles that talk about people deal with this in the context of web apps but have found it difficult to find content. It’s a tricky topic to google. Most of what I find are (usually content marketing) articles about how to log errors and/or how to send them to some service.
I’ll give you an example that is admittedly a little paranoid. Take a switch case statement where you branch of an enum-like value, meaning there’s a set of known values you expect. What do you do for the default case? In theory you don’t need a default case because you “know” the switch won’t hit it, but it’s weird to me to write code that has no logic to handle a possible scenario even if it’s highly unlikely. What if there’s a bug in the code or the enum-like value changes to contain a new value or some weird edge case? The point being in JavaScript there’s no way to be 100% sure that the switch condition will not contain an unexpected value.
Given how unlikely this scenario is though, how do you deal with it? (I realize some of it depends on where in the application’s code this is happening in). You don’t want to throw an exception and break the app. Or you can but you’d want to catch at some point. Do you log the event in the backend and create an alert so that you know a user ran into a weird edge case or bug? Do you write it out to the console in case you get a customer support call so that you can identify the issue? Is it a bad idea to write out errors like that to the console?
I’m sure these are questions that most mature apps have had to answer, but I haven’t been able to find what people consider best practices for these types of situations. If anyone knows of good resources I’d love to read them.