stefpankov

stefpankov

Loggin when Task fails due to raised exception

Hey there,

I’m new to Elixir and OTP and coming from an OO background, I’m still wrapping my head around Processes, Supervisors, Tasks etc.

I’m currently working on a little program that has to go through a bunch of files, read from them, parse the data and do something with it.

I’m trying to speed up this process by using Tasks and I’ve setup a TaskSupervisor which I then use to dynamically start Tasks that parse the data from the file.

It looks something like this

def do_the_thing(dir) do
    for file <- File.ls!(dir) do
      file_name = "#{dir}/#{file}"

      File.read!(file_name)
      |> Parser.parse!()
      |> Enum.each(fn parsed_data ->
        Task.Supervisor.start_child(MyApp.TaskSupervisor, MyTask, :run, [
          parsed_data
        ])
      end)
    end
end

Now this works fine but when an error is raised and MyTask fails, I want to somehow trap the exception and log it in a file with additional metadata so I can see where it failed.

I had a try rescue block inside the MyTask.run function but I have a feeling that’s unnecessary since I’m fine with the Task failing, the ever vigilant Supervisor handles that for me just fine.

I guess my question is, what’s considered best practices when I want to catch exit reasons and log if they interest me. I tried to setup something with Process.monitor but couldn’t really figure out how to match exceptions and not :normal exits.

Marked As Solved

david_ex

david_ex

I’m not sure your approach is the best for what you want to achieve (although I’m no expert): although you’ll get the pid of the child process from start_child (and could therefore monitor it), it the task fails and restarts you won’t be able to “re-monitor” it.

If handling the first failure is good enough for you, the basic steps would be

{:ok, pid} = Task.Supervisor.start_child(MyApp.TaskSupervisor, MyTask, :run, [parsed_data])
ref = Process.monitor(pid)
receive do
  {:DOWN, ^ref, :process, _object, :normal} -> nil # success => do nothing
  {:DOWN, ^ref, :process, _object, reason} -> ... # Log that task for `file_name` failed due to `reason`
end

That said, and depending on what you want to do, you can also use a GenServer and track the state of ongoing tasks. Then, you can use one of the Task.Supervisor.async_nolink to trigger a task and store the ref:

# in e.g. a handle_call
      File.read!(file_name)
      |> Parser.parse!()
      |> Enum.map(fn parsed_data ->
        %Task{ref: ref} = Task.Supervisor.async_nolink(MyApp.TaskSupervisor, MyTask, :run, [
          parsed_data
        ])
        {ref, parsed_data}
      end)
      |> Enum.into(state)

Where state is the GenServer state. To handle task results, use handle_info:

def handle_info({task_ref, task_result}, state) do
  # task was successfully completed, with `task_result`

  # we don't care about the coming `:DOWN` message for this task (which will have reason `:normal`
  # you could also just have a `handle_info` for `:DOWN` with `:normal` reason and do nothing there
  Process.demonitor(task_ref, :flush)
  {:noreply, Map.delete(state, task_ref)}
end

def handle_info({:DOWN, ref, :process, _object, reason}, state) do
  # log the fact that the task processing `Map.get(state, ref)` failed
  {:noreply, state}
end

Also Liked

stefpankov

stefpankov

Thanks for your answer!

Regarding re-monitoring tasks, for now, they’re not contacting any external service so the only fail reason is missing data that is crucial, that’s why I want to get to the exception that caused them to fail and format it nicely with more information so I know exactly what caused them to fail. That means they won’t be restarted after failure and that works just fine, the only thing I need to setup is that monitoring logic.

I like the GenServer approach and read a suggestion about it somewhere else but with no example of how to do it. This is extremely helpful, I’ll try it and post progress here.

lud

lud

Hello,

Not sure if it would fit with your supervision tree, but sometimes I just use this pattern to handle failing tasks:

t1 =
  Task.async(fn ->
    Process.flag(:trap_exit, true)
    parent = self()

    t2 =
      Task.async(fn ->
        raise "failed"
        # do some heavy stuff
        result = :data
        send(parent, result)
      end)

    receive do
      {:EXIT, _, e} ->
        {:error, e}

      result ->
        Task.await(t2)
        {:ok, result}
    end
  end)

t1
|> Task.await()
|> IO.inspect(pretty: true)

Where Next?

Popular in Questions Top

vonH
In asking this question I am more interested about the expressiveness of the language itself and less concerned about the availability of...
New
aalberti333
As the title describes, I’m trying to run Enum.map() over a list of key/value pairs, where the value is a map. My data looks like this: ...
New
rms.mrcs
Hi, I need to transform a list of numbers into a map where the keys are the indexes and the values are the original values of the list....
New
ashish173
I am using Ecto timestamps with postgres, I can see the timestamps() use the :naive_dateime but for my use case I wanted to store the ti...
New
beno
I will often find my self writing things similar to: case some_value do nil -&gt; something() "" -&gt; something() _ -&gt; someth...
New
9mm
I am constructing a JSON object (map) and I need to conditionally set a field. I’m trying to write proper elixir-way code… and I’m at a l...
New
skosch
To my knowledge, put_in, Map.update etc. all have the one limitation of not automatically creating intermediate keys when needed (for exa...
New
lucidguppy
I have a super simple question about elixir - how would I take a file like this foo bar baz and output a new file that enumerates th...
New
siddhant3030
Hi, I have to write a raw query for one of my project. But till now I have used ecto queries and don’t have much experience writing raw ...
New
joeerl
Hello again - after a longish gap I’ve decided I really must dig into Elixir and see what’s been happening here - so I have a few questio...
New

Other popular topics Top

vonH
In asking this question I am more interested about the expressiveness of the language itself and less concerned about the availability of...
New
SoCreat
i’m a new one to elixir which editor can i use vs code? or atom? Thanks! :smiley:
New
jononomo
I am trying to figure out how Mix knows whether the environment is test, dev, or prod -- where is this set? Thanks.
New
Jim
As a follow up to my earlier question: I have the code compiling and running but not getting a successful login from the rest server. ...
New
script
If I have a string “1000 cfu/ml” . I want to remove the characters and / and space . So the string is like this "1000" What is the ...
New
mgjohns61585
Could someone help me? I'm making my first elixir program, number guessing game. I can't figure out how to convert the user's guess from ...
New
ashish173
I am using Ecto timestamps with postgres, I can see the timestamps() use the :naive_dateime but for my use case I wanted to store the ti...
New
fireproofsocks
Forgive me if this is obvious, but how does one delete a database record WITHOUT selecting it first? https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.Repo.h...
New
WestKeys
Currently suffering from paralysis by [HTTP client] analysis. This is rather unusual in Elixirland as there tends to be consensus on the ...
New
belgoros
I’m not a pro in using Regex and can’t figure out why the following behaviour happens, especially if we take into account the difference ...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement