What Are Common Error Messages?
In our last Feature Spotlight, we mentioned that you can customize your Testomato tests to check for “common error messages”. We understand this is a very general description, so our team felt it would be helpful to spend more time explaining this particular option of that feature.
Error messages display when an unexpected condition occurs within the HTML code on your website. Today, we will go through each of the types of errors we check for and give you a brief explanation of each.
Common Server Messages
Testomato checks for several common error messages that indicate server-side errors. This means that we identify problems with your website’s server (or your network connection to the server) rather than issues that originate from your computer.
Our tests are designed to detect the most common error messages that commonly occur across platform and server softwares, like “Internal Server Error”.
All Types of PHP Error Messages
PHP is a popular open source server-side scripting language, which is run through a web server and then, generates web pages in your browser. PHP has a number of possible errors that it might return, but these errors all fall into 3 basic categories:
- Notices: These are minor errors that don’t interfere with the script. Generally, users are not informed that an error has occurred.
- Warnings: These errors are considered more serious as they mean there is something missing or there is an incorrect code. The script will still run, but the user receives an error message.
- Fatal Errors: These errors cause your script to terminate and crash. This means that your script has called a function that’s missing or isn’t accessible to your program.
- Fatal
- Catchable fatal
- Warning
- Notice
- Parse error
- Strict standards
- Deprecated
- Unknown errors (these can be produced by bugs in PHP)
All MySQL Error Messages
MySQL is an open-resource relational data management system. In simple terms, this means you’re able to create a database structure to store data (or automate a process) on your server.
When a MySQL error is returned, it will contain 3 types of information:
- A numeric error code. These codes are specific to MySQL and are not related to any other database systems.
- A 5-character SQLSTATE value.
- A message that explains your error.
Here’s a full list of MySQL errors – we test for ALL of them!
XDebug/Nette Framework debugger Output
XDebug is a PHP debugging extension and the Nette Framework debugger is tool that is used on Nette Framework (a popular PHP web development tool). Both XDebug and the Nette debugging tool are used for bug detection in PHP. Testomato helps make this process even easier by checking for their output within your page content.
Errors that are found by XDebug and the Nette Framework debugger are both reported in an easily recognizable format (visually and within the source code).
The Nette Framework debugger will display an error similar to the screenshot below:
An error from the Xdebug extension will look something like this:
Here are a few more links you might find helpful:
Debugging and Error Handling (Nette Framework)
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