@selfage/nested_error

Install

npm install @selfage/nested_error

Overview

Written in TypeScript and compiled to ES6 with inline source map & source. See @selfage/tsconfig for full compiler options. Provides a simple implementation to take an error as the cause and output nested stacks with "Caused by: ".

Constructor

Supply an existing error as the cause like the following.

import { StdError } from '@selfage/nested_error';

throw new StdError('more context', new Error('Failure'));

It will output the following, omitting some details.

StdError: more context
    at Object.<anonymous> (.../nested_error/temp.js:4:7)
    ...
Caused by: Error: Failure
    at Object.<anonymous> (.../nested_error/temp.js:4:47)
    ...

And of course, it's optional to supply an existing error.

Any cause

When catching an error, it's often of any type, which can be passed to StdError without type assertion/casting, i.e., when stack property is not available, it calls toString() to generate the output.

import { StdError } from '@selfage/nested_error';

try {
  throw 'Failed!';
} catch (e) {
  throw new StdError('some issue', e);
}

It will output the following, omitting details.

StdError: some issue
    at Object.<anonymous> (.../nested_error/temp.js:8:11)
    ...
Caused by: Failed!

Subclass

To define subclasses, you should extend NestedError instead.

import { NestedError } from '@selfage/nested_error';

class CustomError extends NestedError {
  public constructor(message?: string, cause?: any) {
    super('CustomError', message, cause);
  }
}

throw new CustomError('more context', new Error('Failure'));

CustomError: more context
    at Object.<anonymous> (.../nested_error/temp.js:9:7)
    ...
Caused by: Error: Failure
    at Object.<anonymous> (.../nested_error/temp.js:9:39)
    ...

Note that you need to pass the class name to super() because of minification.

Minification

StdError is the simplest subclass of NestedError. All subclasses of NestedError require their names to be explicitly passed into super(), such that even if class names are minified/mangled, stacks still show the right error names.

However, the downside is that subclasses of StdError cannot change their error names.

Compatibility

With ES6, we can simply extend native Error class, without the need to fix issues such as broken prototype chain.

new StdError('failure') instanceof Error; // true

However, it could bring compatibility issue to old browsers.

Stack trace from TypeScript source file

If you are developing in TypeScript, printing stack trace from TypeScript source file is often desired. One option is to install source-map-support.

import { StdError } from '@selfage/nested_error';
import 'source-map-support/register';

throw new StdError('more context', new Error('Failure'));

It will output the following, omitting details.

StdError: more context
    at Object.<anonymous> (.../nested_error/temp.ts:4:7)
    ...
Caused by: Error: Failure
    at Object.<anonymous> (.../nested_error/temp.ts:4:39)
    ...