Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Sat, 02/05/2022 - 00:27
Uploaded a few obs just now and got an error "the website experienced an unexpected error". Okay, lets go to the forum to see if anyone else had this (I'd already successfully uploaded another sessuion earlier this evening).
Nobody else had commented BUT... I did get, on the forum page, the actual error (repeated twice) as to why the upload failed. Turned out there was a missing decimal point in the magnitude (137 instead of 13.7). Put the DP back, and all OK. So, how come a webobs error is being echoed to a different page?
I experienced the same thing last month, Mike. Thought I was going mad!
In the event I was relieved that I managed to upload my obs so I didn’t report it, largely cos it would have been difficult to describe. But you have done so perfectly!
"the website experienced an unexpected error" A really good example of a less than helpful error message.
The Program knows it had a problem with reading the magnitude. Why not say so?
Hello,
I can provide a little clarification on what the issue is. First whenever you get the message "The website experienced an unexpected error" it means that something happened that we didn't foresee happening and rather than display the whole error message (which can be exploited from a security standpoint), it hides the error instead. WebObs knew the issue with your observation and would have told you. However, when it tried to send that information back to the browser there was an issue with the data type (e.g. it was expecting a string and it got a number or something similar). In essence, the "unexpected error" happened because webobs hit a fault when trying to display the actual error. We are working on a fix to this which should hopefully be done soon. However, I hope this helps provide a bit more context.
Thanks,
Bert Pablo
Staff Astronomer, AAVSO
Tnx Bert.