I thought I had blogged about Errorception before, but unless my search engine skills are failing me I must not have ever gotten around to it. Errorception is a service that aggregates and reports on client-side errors on your web site. By placing a simple embed in your HTML code, all errors will be sent off to their service for your perusal. When I first tested this service, I remember thinking, glibly, that I hope I'd get enough data points to make it worthwhile to demonstrate. I mean, my blog runs well, I never see any errors myself, so I just kinda assumed everything was good. Heh.

I logged in to the Errorception portal after a week and discovered that there were a huge amount of errors reported. Obviously my blog "worked", and most of these bugs were not preventing people from using my site, but I really had no idea what was going on and Errorception provided a wealth of data. Here are some screen shots from those reports. (Note that the screenshots are from last year.)

First - the general list of issues:

Then a drill down:

And yet another drill down:

Errorception is not a free service, but the pricing model seems rather fair to me and as I said - I can bet you've got more issues than you think you do.

So what about PhoneGap? When I tried to use the Errorception code snippet with PhoneGap, I noted that the error reporting didn't work. I got in contact with the Errorception team and Rakesh Pai was able to figure out the issue.

Here is the original snippet:

(function(_,e,rr,s){_errs=[s];var c=_.onerror;_.onerror=function(){var a=arguments;_errs.push(a);
c&&c.apply(this,a)};var b=function(){var c=e.createElement(rr),b=e.getElementsByTagName(rr)[0];
c.src="//beacon.errorception.com/"+s+".js";c.async=!0;b.parentNode.insertBefore(c,b)};
_.addEventListener?_.addEventListener("load",b,!1):_.attachEvent("onload",b)})
(window,document,"script","51b2cbdbbc99c00b1700025a");

Rakesh noticed this:

It turns out, the problem you faced is indeed trivial, fortunately. The tracking snippet Errorception gives you is protocol-relative, so as to make it work on HTTP and HTTPS. However, on phonegap, the protocol for the 'index.html' page is file://, and so the tracking snippet fails to load (404).

The fix is simple: it's to modify the snippet to load the beacon from a hard-coded http/https protocol

Here is his modified snippet:

c=_.onerror;_.onerror=function(){var a=arguments;_errs.push(a);
c&&c.apply(this,a)};var b=function(){var
c=e.createElement(rr),b=e.getElementsByTagName(rr)[0];
c.src="http://beacon.errorception.com/"+s+".js";c.async=!0;b.parentNode.insertBefore(c,b)};
_.addEventListener?_.addEventListener("load",b,!1):_.attachEvent("onload",b)})
(window,document,"script","51b2cbdbbc99c00b1700025a");  

That worked! I fired up both my iOS simulator and my Android simulator and as soon as I forced my error they showed up immediately in the console.

Notice that the error is reported differently in iOS versus Android.