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Error masking and internals leaking in error handling

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#209 3 comments 3 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
api

Research direction

Start by tracing exception handling through execute_graphql(), execute(), resolve_or_error(), complete_value_catching_error(), complete_value(), and ExecutionContext.report_error(). Read the linked issues for related traceback and logging behavior, then define and verify which exceptions are reported to clients, which propagate, and how original traceback information is preserved without exposing sensitive details.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

There are several places (execute_graphql(), complete_value(), complete_value_catching_error(), resolve_or_error(), execute() ExecutionContext.report_error(), may be there is more) where the library indiscriminately catches all exceptions and reports them to client. It's correct behaviour for parsing/usage errors. But for programming and runtime errors there are problems:

  • original error is lost and traceback is not reported, so it becomes hard to debug;
  • potentially sensitive information is leaked to client via error message.

I believe the the right behaviour would be to catch and report to client specific exceptions only (GraphQLError and subclasses?) while propagating the rest.

Related issues:

Dominant language
Python
Stars
371
Forks
175
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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