DevAlert

This lightweight library provides visual alerts to developers and QA when an issue happens during development/testing phase.

In traditional android development, when an issue occurs, we use logs to dump the unexpected state or exception trace. Printing to logcat is not enough at times as:

• Logs can be overlooked by developers if we are not constantly monitoring.
• Logs maybe on a remote device which is inaccessible.

Using this library, you can provide visual warning to the developer/ QA when something goes wrong on your test or internal builds so that critical issues can be highlighted as and when they happen.

Example

In the example below, the ParseException may occur only for some specific response from server and is not always reproducible.

try {
    Data data = parser.parse(response.body().json());
} catch(ParseException ex) {
    Log.d(TAG, ex);
    DevAlert.reportError(TAG, "Response data is corrupt", ex);
}

While development or testing, when the issue happens, even if the developer/QA is not actively looking or monitoring the log for this issue, will get instantly notified.

How to Use

Add the dependency in build.gradle:

dependencies {
    ...
    ...
    compile 'com.garena.devalert:dev-alert:0.1.2'
}

Initialise the library in the Application class:

public class SampleApplication extends Application {

    @Override
    public void onCreate() {
        super.onCreate();
        DevAlert.init(this, BuildConfig.DEBUG);
    }
}

Report errors or warning from anywhere in the app:

// report error
DevAlert.reportError(TAG, message, exception);

// report warning
DevAlert.reportWarning(TAG, message, exception);

Other Possible Use-Cases

1. Report exceptions from background threads without crashing the app.

2. If you are building a library or SDK, you can provide better feedback to other developers who are going to use it. (If you have worked with React-Native, it provides a similar functionality.)

3. Create custom rules for the health check of your app and visually alert the developer/QA when these rules are violated. For example: database calls on UI thread or adding heavy code in onCreate.

Advance Usage

You can configure the library to show selective errors or warnings use the DevAlertConfig:

DevAlertConfig config = new DevAlertConfig.Builder()
      .showErrors(true)
      .showWarnings(false) // hide warnings
      .ignoredTags(Arrays.asList("MODULE_A", "MODULE_B")) // hide these tags
      .build();
DevAlert.init(getApplication(), isDevMode, config);

More Info

Here is an informal blog post https://engineering.garena.com/introducing-devalert-garena-open-source/ which lists some scenarios in which we have used this library to improve our product.