Introduction
The Pipeline can contain and number or configuration of flow elements, including custom third-party ones. As such, it must have a robust and consistent error handling solution.
Approach
Almost all languages have try/catch constructs, so these are used by the Pipeline code when calling functions on flow elements.
If the flow element code raises an error, it will be handled by the catch statement.
Any error that occurs will be logged in the Errors section of the current flow data. The pipeline then proceeds to execution of the next flow element.
After all flow elements have completed, there are two possible scenarios, depending on pipeline configuration:
- If the flow data contains any errors then an error will be raised using the standard language features.
- Execution will return to the caller of the
Processfunction. Any errors will effectively be hidden/suppressed unless logging is configured or theErrorssection of the flow data is checked by the caller.
Configuration
Error handling is configured using the 'Suppress Process Exceptions' setting. If set to true, errors are hidden/suppressed. If false, an error will be raised at the end of Pipeline execution.
The default value is false. This is recommended for development/testing to highlight issues.
When running the Pipeline in production, we recommend setting this to true in order to prevent unexpected errors from crashing the application.
As with all configuration settings, this can be set in code or via a Pipeline configuration file.