[Dancer-users] Runtime error having to do with hooks (which I don't use)

[Brian E. Lozier]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 2:29 AM, David Precious <davidp at preshweb.co.uk> wrote:
> On Friday 10 June 2011 00:30:57 Brian E. Lozier wrote:
>> Well I tracked down one bug that turns out may be a documentation bug.
>>  I haven't had time to look really really carefully but I was able to
>> reproduce a crash when just starting app.pl if the "hook" syntax is
>> wrong.  The docs say you can do this:
>>
>> hook before_template sub {
>>  # do something
>> };
>>
>> But you really need to do it like this:
>> 8d50158
>> hook before_template => sub {
>>  # do something
>> };
>>
>> A bunch of the hook documentation is broken, [...]
>
> You're absolutely right, thanks!  Documentation fixed in 8d50158 which will be
> in the next release.
>
> hook before_template sub {...} is of course wrong, as there's no comma (fat or
> otherwise) between two params to hook() (and without the fat comma,
> 'before_template' doesn't get auto-quoted, so it's an unknown bareword, too).
>
>> I'm still trying to
>> find out the root cause of my original issue (which is why I tried
>> using the "hook" syntax instead of declaring the before_template
>> directly).
>
> Hopefully I'll get a chance to dig further after $work; so far, I've not been
> able to reproduce the issue you're having.  I think the machine I tested on is
> still on 1.3050, though, so it may be something that changed in 1.3051.  I'll
> try 1.3051 and/or devel and see what happens.

I haven't been able to get this to reproduce outside the app I'm
working on.  However, I think I traced down the problem.  In
Dancer/Factory/Hook.pm there's a line that looks like this:

$_->(@args) foreach @{$self->get_hooks_for($hook_name)};

I did this before and after that line:

 warn Dumper($self->get_hooks_for($hook_name));

And I noticed that the arrayref of hooks before it was executed the
first time looked like this:

$VAR1 = [
          sub { "DUMMY" }
        ];

But after it ran the first time it returned this:

$VAR1 = [
          undef
        ];

So somehow the subroutine ref held for my before_template_render hook
would be turned to undef with no warnings or anything on the console.
I haven't been able to figure out why this is but I found if I changed
the line to be a foreach with a localized var instead of using $_ the
crash completely went away:

   foreach my $hook (@{ $self->get_hooks_for($hook_name) }) {
       $hook->(@args);
   }

It seems like a scoping issue with $_ or @_ or something.  I only have
an hour or so a day to work on this project so I don't have time to
dig much deeper today but maybe this will help you reproduce it
somehow.  I tried explicitly calling "die" inside a hook to try to
reproduce this and I noticed that nothing dies, no errors get printed
to the logs, no errors are shown in the browser either.  This is
really, really dangerous that something can completely swallow death
and pretend nothing happened.  I suspect this behavior is contributing
to making this specific bug difficult to reproduce.

I tried to find somewhere in Dancer where die was being trapped but
came up with nothing so far.

>
> Cheers
>
> Dave P
>
> --
> David Precious  ("bigpresh")
> http://www.preshweb.co.uk/
>
>   "Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support
>   it for the rest of your life". (Michael Sinz)
>