Just an idea…
by Josh on Jan.29, 2009, under Flash, Flex
Have you ever launched a new Flash or Flex application, only to start receiving reports of it crashing, but there are no other details to work off of other than “it’s broken”?
I’m sure I’m not the first person to want this, but I thought of this recently: How awesome would it be if the Flash Player provided the option to send a bug report or crash log back to the developer if they wanted to receive them?
What I’d like to see is something that a developer could include in their code, possibly through a metadata tag so that it’s compiled into the SWF, that would provide the user with the option to submit a bug report to the developer.
Maybe something like this:
[CrashLog(dest="bugs@developersAddress.com")]
If the SWF crashed, or hit one of those “A script is causing the Flash Player…” errors, a crash dialog could be displayed to the user, and give them the option to submit a report. This report could then be submitted by the Flash Player to the developer, who would receive at minimum a crash log of what was going on in the Flash Player at that time. If they wanted to, the user could also detail what they were doing/trying to do, or submit system info, like what browser they’re using, and other web-related info. Even if the only info returned was a snapshot of the same info you get in the Flex Builder debugger when an error is thrown, that would be more info than we often get from users.
Would anyone else be interested in getting something like this? Is it even possible that we could see it in the Flash Player some day? If anyone on the Flash Player team is reading this, feel free to add this one in next time you get bored. 
January 29th, 2009 on 11:58 AM
Intriguing idea. But I’m not sure if its viable due to the purposefully lean nature of Flash Player. Adding such a feature would add a significant overhead burden to the player.
January 29th, 2009 on 1:17 PM
Brilliant. I think this is the official place to post this kind of idea: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
Great thought. Instead of sending an email, it could alternately POST the data to a specified URL and the developer can choose what to do with the data from there.
[CrashLog(dest="http://www.example.com/myflashapp/crashlog")]
January 29th, 2009 on 1:21 PM
To Ben’s point, POSTing to a URL could use the built-in URLRequest class…
January 29th, 2009 on 1:38 PM
@Ben -
That’s possible, but considering the other stuff that’s been added to the player, I’m not sure that this would add too much more. The Flash Player is intended to be pretty lean, but it’s still not as lightweight as it used to be. (For obvious reasons.)
@skye -
I do like the idea of POSTing the data to a URL, but my intent for this feature would be in the event of a crash or other error that would prevent you from using URLRequest. I have in the past used URLRequest with some error handling I built into an application, but sometimes no matter how hard you try to catch an error, there will always a few times where things tank so badly, the browser would have to be restarted.
This feature request would be for those times.
January 29th, 2009 on 2:37 PM
I think that’s a great idea. At the least I would like to see the ability to capture any error thrown in the app and then wire up my own system to send out the error report. The last time I poked around at the idea it seemed like there was no way to do a global try-catch. Anyone seen something like this successfully implemented?
January 31st, 2009 on 2:10 PM
@Josh,
Makes sense. Did you submit the request to Adobe?
February 10th, 2009 on 2:55 PM
Just thought I’d chime in and mention that Doug McCune recently started a related thread:
http://dougmccune.com/blog/2009/02/10/how-are-you-doing-global-exception-handling-in-flexflashas3/