Error Handling

Yii provides a complete error handling framework based on the PHP 5 exception mechanism. When the application is created to handle an incoming user request, it registers its handleError method to handle PHP warnings and notices; and it registers its handleException method to handle uncaught PHP exceptions. Consequently, if a PHP warning/notice or an uncaught exception occurs during the application execution, one of the error handlers will take over the control and start the necessary error handling procedure.

Tip: The registration of error handlers is done in the application's constructor by calling PHP functions set_exception_handler and set_error_handler. If you do not want Yii to handle the errors and exceptions, you may define constant YII_ENABLE_ERROR_HANDLER and YII_ENABLE_EXCEPTION_HANDLER to be false in the entry script.

By default, handleError (or handleException) will raise an onError event (or onException event). If the error (or exception) is not handled by any event handler, it will call for help from the errorHandler application component.

1. Raising Exceptions ¶

Raising exceptions in Yii is not different from raising a normal PHP exception. One uses the following syntax to raise an exception when needed:

throw new ExceptionClass('ExceptionMessage');

Yii defines three exception classes: CException, CDbException and CHttpException. CException is a generic exception class. CDbException represents an exception that is caused by some DB-related operations. CHttpException represents an exception that should be displayed to end users and carries a statusCode property representing an HTTP status code. The class of an exception determines how it should be displayed, as we will explain next.

Tip: Raising a CHttpException exception is a simple way of reporting errors caused by user misoperation. For example, if the user provides an invalid post ID in the URL, we can simply do the following to show a 404 error (page not found):

// if post ID is invalid
throw new CHttpException(404,'The specified post cannot be found.');

2. Displaying Errors ¶

When an error is forwarded to the CErrorHandler application component, it chooses an appropriate view to display the error. If the error is meant to be displayed to end users, such as a CHttpException, it will use a view named errorXXX, where XXX stands for the HTTP status code (e.g. 400, 404, 500). If the error is an internal one and should only be displayed to developers, it will use a view named exception. In the latter case, complete call stack as well as the error line information will be displayed.

Info: When the application runs in production mode, all errors including those internal ones will be displayed using view errorXXX. This is because the call stack of an error may contain sensitive information. In this case, developers should rely on the error logs to determine what is the real cause of an error.

CErrorHandler searches for the view file corresponding to a view in the following order:

1. WebRoot/themes/ThemeName/views/system: this is the system view directory under the currently active theme.

2. WebRoot/protected/views/system: this is the default system view directory for an application.

3. yii/framework/views: this is the standard system view directory provided by the Yii framework.

Therefore, if we want to customize the error display, we can simply create error view files under the system view directory of our application or theme. Each view file is a normal PHP script consisting of mainly HTML code. For more details, please refer to the default view files under the framework's view directory.

3. Handling Errors Using an Action ¶

Yii allows using a controller action to handle the error display work. To do so, we should configure the error handler in the application configuration as follows:

return array(
    ......
    'components'=>array(
        'errorHandler'=>array(
            'errorAction'=>'site/error',
        ),
    ),
);

In the above, we configure the CErrorHandler::errorAction property to be the route site/error which refers to the error action in SiteController. We may use a different route if needed.

We can write the error action like the following:

public function actionError()
{
    if($error=Yii::app()->errorHandler->error)
        $this->render('error', $error);
}

In the action, we first retrieve the detailed error information from CErrorHandler::error. If it is not empty, we render the error view together with the error information. The error information returned from CErrorHandler::error is an array with the following fields:

• code: the HTTP status code (e.g. 403, 500);
• type: the error type (e.g. CHttpException, PHP Error);
• message: the error message;
• file: the name of the PHP script file where the error occurs;
• line: the line number of the code where the error occurs;
• trace: the call stack of the error;
• source: the context source code where the error occurs.

Tip: The reason we check if CErrorHandler::error is empty or not is because the error action may be directly requested by an end user, in which case there is no error. Since we are passing the $error array to the view, it will be automatically expanded to individual variables. As a result, in the view we can access directly the variables such as $code, $type.

4. Message Logging ¶

A message of level error will always be logged when an error occurs. If the error is caused by a PHP warning or notice, the message will be logged with category php; if the error is caused by an uncaught exception, the category would be exception.ExceptionClassName (for CHttpException its statusCode will also be appended to the category). One can thus exploit the logging feature to monitor errors happened during application execution.