What is a good way to pass useful state information to an exception in Java?

Question

I noticed some confusion initially with my question. I\'m not asking about how to configure a logger nor how to use a logger properly, but rather how to capture all of the infor

Answer 1

Perhaps I'm missing something, but if the users really require a relatively quiet log file, why don't you just configure your debug logs to go to a separate spot?

If that's insufficient, then capture a fixed amount of the debug logs in RAM. E.g., the last 500 entries. Then, when something ugly happens, dump the debug logs along with the problem report. You don't mention your logging framework, but this would be pretty easy to do in Log4J.

Even better, assuming you have the user's permission, just send an automatic error report rather than logging. I recently helped some folks run down a hard-to-find bug and made the error reporting automatic. We got 50x the number of bug reports, making the problem pretty easy to find.