try/except around serialization blocks some workflows about aws-xray-sdk-python HOT 4 CLOSED

I've realized I can update my custom exception to inherit from BaseException to get it to raise through this statement, but there are probably other use cases still blocked by excessive try/except through the library.

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Hi, the idea of those try/except blocks is that X-Ray tracing is not mission critical from an customer application's standpoint. It should not break the application because of any library internal issue or sometimes even instrumentation bug.

But I do agree there is a valid use case. There is a bad design where anything happens inside serialization is swallowed in the data model level, which doesn't give the caller much control of exception handling. The right fix IMO is to have the emitter module to handle this exception since emitter is the one responsible for serialization and UDP transmission. That way you can override the emitter module and handle your custom exception the way you need.

The excessive try/except act as a firewall between the library and your application code. We can improve those places case by case like this time but I would argue the current approach is better to begin with. Please let me know if you have any additional thoughts.

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You're right, I think my use case is a bit niche and I've worked around it by making it inherit from BaseException, which makes it a lot more like KeyboardInterrupt / SystemExit which are also whole-program control-flow exceptions. At least nothing in xray is doing unspecified try/except which is the evilest 😈 (actually one test does! test_async_local_storage.py )

Having some way to customize which exceptions are ignored would probably be useful for someone but not for my application so I don't mind this issue being closed now.

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Thank you for explaining your use case and we appreciate your feedback. I'm closing this now and track this as a refactor item internally.

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