Question

I am looking into implementing a simple crash report on my application that will ask the user if he wants or not to send the crash log to us.

I never did a crash report before, what I am used to do is a try/catch around saving the errors to a log file.

1. What is the correct way to implement a crash report system ?

2. How do you trigger the crash report to open and send the dump when the application crashs or what is the correct approch to send the data ?

I think the above are my biggest doubts as to how it works or should work… I am not entirely sure if the crash report would be a interact of try/catchs with a external app trigged when the above happens or what would be the correct way to follow it.

I dont have SQL Server available so what I was planning to use would be a simple upload script that the app to report the dump would use to send the data.

Pardon me for my ignorance about how the crash report works and I hope the community can help me understand it better.

I was searching around about crash report and saw most things going around Crystal Report, ready to go libraries, etc but I would like to start it small so I can get a better understanding of it before digging into some big library or other solution if it is available at my end.

Answer 1

Much depends on the application and (in particular) the anticipated privacy concerns of your users.

Assuming this is a client application running on users’ PCs, if this is an “intranet” internal application then it should be quite simple to have the application email the log file to you as the application exits.

This can be quite fun, as sometimes you’ll fix the bug before users get around to reporting it.

Alternatively, if you’re concerned that the application may crash and the unhandled exception won’t be caught properly, you could

1. On startup, write a registry entry (or dummy file entry, or what-have-you) that marks “application not terminated properly”
2. On a clean exit, clean up the registry entry (or what-have-you)
3. On startup, check to see if the registry entry (etc.) exists.

If the marker is present, then you know the application crashed in an un-clean fashion, so you can prompt the user with text e.g. “Last time you ran this program it didn’t appear to exit properly. Would you like to send a log of what happened to us so we can try and fix any problem that might have occurred?”