Recently, I was playing around with a little OAuth consumer app that I had thrown together. Everything was all fine and dandy until suddenly I began seeing those damned "Something went wrong" Rails error pages. You know what I'm talking about...
Well, as it turns out, the problem was the sketchy OAuth provider api. It was down/unresponsive/whatever. Shame on me for not writing robust enough code to blow up gracefully.
What's a girl to do? I'm not sure about her, but what I did was come up with a dry little way to not see that stupid red apology again.
All of my OAuth crap was in the same controller, and whenever the oauth gem choked on the sketchy api I just wanted it to redirect back to the referrer. So here's what I did...
def raises_exception?
begin
yield
rescue => ex
Rails.logger.info("Exception occurred (#{ex.class.to_s}): #{ex.message}")
flash[:error] = "There was a problem completing your request. Please try again later."
redirect_to request.referrer
return true
end
return false
end
And then anywhere in my controller that I was calling an oauth method that might spawn a request (and bomb), I did this...
return if raises_exception? do # call out to the sketchy api end
So in the raises_exception? method, it yields to block of code inside a rescue block. If an exception occurs, its rescued, logged, and then the request is redirected back to the referrer.
One thing to take note of -- you have to prepend the raises_exception? call with return if. Otherwise, the code in that action will continue to execute, and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want that.
There you have it, just a little sumthin-sumthin...
