No matter how well the site is developed and how meticulously it is tested, from time to time errors can appear.
When the site is still at construction, this cause no problems - you can activate trace and find out enough information to localize the error.
Problems arise, when the site passes in an operating conditions and it real visitors start to use.
In this situation, trace is naturally can not be left activated. Moreover, a visitor should not be shown warning about error the way it looks when generated by ASP .NET, first it irritates a visitor (no visitor would enjoy watching error warnings), second, this information could be used by unfair user for improper purposes.
On the other hand, you as a developer need as more detailed information as possible to eliminate an error, such as information about occurred exception and, if possible, state of page/application at the moment of error's occurrence.
Standard approach applied for this task is installing global interceptor of errors. When exception occurs, the interceptor will fulfill two actions - visible for a user, and invisible - for a developer. Visible - handler will show a page with a friendly notification about the problem to a visitor, this notification will be in tune with overall design of the page. Invisible - handler will record information about the occurred exception to somewhere (for instance, to system event log).
And here a problem appears. The thing is that information about the error which is encapsulated by System.Error.Exteption object is generally not enough. Perhaps, factors of the occurred exception are incorrect interpretation of incoming parameters (for instance, QueryString or Form), or maybe the session contains data that differ from those you calculated, or (the most annoying for a developer) - a specific concourse of circumstances occurred (specific combination of values of variables and collections) that caused the error.
ErrorReporter is designed specifically to solve this problem.
ErrorReporter grants maximum information not only about an error itself, but also about the state of the system at the moment of its occurrence. You can see state of main collections (Cookie, Query String, Server Variables, etc.), Request details, Cache and Application state, your source code that provoked the exception with highlighted error command and great deal of other useful information. ErrorReporter can save this information to the disc as html-file, it can send it by letter to the specified email or a list of emails.
The information supplied by ErrorReporter will help you to localize an error with maximum speed, detect factors that caused it and eliminate it on-the-fly.
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