Huge exception message when dealing with large strings and column size restriction

[simboel]

Note: See Pull Request #1667

Problem

When writing an entity to the database that exceeds the column limit (i.e. string with 200 characters in varchar(32)) the value will be printed in the message of the raised IllegalArgumentException in the format

throw IllegalArgumentException("Value '$value' can't be stored to database column because exceeds length ($colLength)")

For small strings this is no problem, but when dealing with huge binary data or strings (like base64 encoded data) the Exception message will grow out of hand quickly. Additionally this may expose sensitive data to the logs (passwords, GDPR-related data or other secrets).

I've encountered this problem when a JUnit test failed but was shown as still running in IDEA. After some investigation I've found that IDEA wasn't able to parse the logs to determine the current state of the test because the value I tried to write to the database was roughly 500,000 characters in size.

Proposed solution

I could think of multiple solutions:

1. Exposed shouldn't mention the value at all (just state that the size of the value is greater than the column length and provide both numbers). Example: "Value can't be stored to database column because exceeds length ($valueLength > $length)"
2. Exposed should only mention the first N characters/bytes of the value. Example: "Value '${value.take(50)}' can't be stored to database column because exceeds length ($colLength)". Maybe when more than N characters are present, Exposed should add [...] to the value representation.

Solution 2 would preserve the status quo without bloating the logs or output. But I'm unsure if the user really wants to know the value here. In theory this exception should never be thrown if the application code is correct. And if it is thrown, the user may only be interested in the length of the value (because he probably just made a calculation mistake for the column length). Together with the security/privacy reasoning I'm thinking the right choice would be solution 1 from above.

What are your thoughts about this? Pull request with solution 1: #1667