Ugly, helpful error messages

I've been trying to sign up for an ACM SIGPLAN membership for over a week. Whenever I hit the button to submit my application, I got an error message with a bunch of raw stack trace information. I figured eventually someone at the ACM would fix this, but apparently not.

Around about the tenth time that my application failed to be processed, I finally decided to read the error message carefully. Here's what I saw:

Error Executing Database Query.
ORA-00001: unique constraint (MSF.CP_PK) violated
[... snip...]
SQL INSERT INTO client_phones(CLIENT_NO,PHONE_TYPE,PHONE,CREATED_BY,CREATED_DATE) VALUES('7781127','PRIMARY','617 ***-****','SQJOnline',sysdate)
[...snip...]

Hmmm... it looked like there might be a problem with a duplicate phone number somewhere in the database. What if I used a different number? So I tried my home number, and all of a sudden everything went through smoothly! Let's hear it for ugly ColdFusion error messages.

Posted on December 17, 2006 05:29 PM
More programming articles

Comments

Hmmm, more like let's hear it for silly database designs... A phone # as primary key?

Posted by: Mike G. at December 18, 2006 04:28 PM
Post a comment









Remember info?




Prove you're human. Type "human":