Logging all exceptions

Question

Hi,
I am working on a project where we extend an application built by a third party vendor. I've spent hours trying to determine the cause of some exceptions. The vendor transforms exceptions thrown by the application server or Oracle into their own exceptions. In this process they tend to drop the original cause or message and replace it by a somewhat vague "Database problem probably due to RI violation." not mentioning what constraint caused it. After a long debugging session I managed to figure it out.
I was wondering if I could somehow log all exceptions thrown in the application. I was thinking of some AOP kind of way. Since I don't have the code of the core product classes, I would have to add something at runtime? I believe AspectJ is out of the question since I cannot recompile the vendors code. Spring AOP is out of the question, because I believe it can only add extra behaviour to beans in the application context. We don't use spring at all, so no beans available.
Is there any other way to get to the hidden exceptions or should I just forget about this? I'm going to try to solve some part with jdbc logging first.
Thanks for any input.

Answer 1

garava wrote:
I guess if you don't have the code with you, there is no point in exploring the exceptions. Basically they have already catched them.There actually is a point in exploring them: If Oracle throws an exception "Unique constraint YOUR_UNIQUE_CONSTRAINT violated." and all you see is "There was an exception", then there is a good point in getting that exception information. It could be some parameter that you pass to the system that might cause this problem. The way I did it now was telling the eclipse debugger to break at every exception. I honestly hadn't expected to see that application throw so many internal exceptions!
georgemc wrote:
You could slip your own JDBC driver in between the app and the real JDBC driver, give you a bit more insight into what's going on. Write some classes that implement the basic JDBC interfaces, do some logging or whatever, then pass the calls on to your "real" JDBC driver classes. There's at least one open-source project around that already does this, but I can't remember the name of it off the top of me headThanks George, I might do that if I get enough time for it. I found [this article|http://www.rgagnon.com/javadetails/java-0411.html] where they set a logWriter on a DriverManager. This might be enough to capture the jdbc exceptions.