6 minutes

Building Flutter Dev Tools with ApptiveGrid - Error Reporting

Add a lightweight and privacy focused error reporting to your Flutter Apps using apptive_grid_error_reporting

Author

Anton Borries

Published

October 11, 2023

Building Flutter Dev Tools with ApptiveGrid - Error Reporting

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While building several Flutter Apps in the past that use ApptiveGrid as a Data Source we realized that we could use the power of ApptiveGrid and our suite of ApptiveGrid Flutter Packages to build tools for development and quality insurance of Flutter Apps.

We are already using several of these tools in the apps we are building and we are excited to announce that we are open sourcing the first package now. apptive_grid_error_reporting is a little tool to easily report errors to an ApptiveGrid Space

Why another error reporting tool?

Of course there are lots of options in the space of error reporting that all have their place. However we noticed that for our apps - often time for small customers - these solutions and associated costs are not always a great fit.

Another point is obviously that we want to use ApptiveGrid more ourselves. So while exploring options on how we can incorporate ApptiveGrid in more of our day to day work we quickly realized that we can build a lightweight and customizable solution for basic error reporting that is also GDPR compliant.

Setting it up

Create a new Space to your ApptiveGrid Account using this template. (If you don't have an ApptiveGrid Account yet you can create one in the process. It's free)
Go to the reporting form and copy the link from the share menu

Add `apptive_grid_error_reporting` to you pubspec dependencies and create a reporting instance using the form link

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That's already it all in terms of setting everything up.

Reporting Errors

To report errors simply call

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Optionally you can provide more information like a StackTrace or a custom message to better figure out where the error occurred.

If you want to track down what a user might have done leading up to the error you can simply add some log entries.

These logs will be added to the reports inside ApptiveGrid as a .txt file for your error analysis

Creating custom Views

In ApptiveGrid you can view your data not only as a Grid but also create custom views based on your needs. In this next example I can show you how quick it is to create a simple Kanban view for all the issues.

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Create a Kanban View

Select the "Status" field as the default field

Enable the column for ungrouped entries

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You now have a Kanban Board right inside of ApptiveGrid for all reported errors where you can move cards just like with any other view. You can customize these views by playing around with custom filters or sorting.

Using ApptiveGrid Workflows

ApptiveGrid offers custom workflows that can be used to get more out of your error reports. In this next example I'll show you how quickly you can set up custom Slack Notifications whenever there is a new error reported

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Go to the Workflows tab inside your ApptiveGrid and create a new flow

Select "New Entry" as your trigger. Configure to use the Reporting Grid as the source

Add a "Slack" action
- If you "test the action" the fields panel will be populated with placeholder tokens that you can then use to create custom slack messages that report new errors

- Add your Slack Webhook Url

Further customization

In this article I have only shown how to add custom views and use a simple workflow to report errors on Slack. However you can customize the whole reporting even further. For example you could add an "Assigned" Field to your grid and automatically send an email to the assigned developer using a workflow when you change the value or anything in the field by playing around with the trigger conditions inside the flow.

Also using the Http Call Node you can integrate with a lot of other services/products that you are already using for example to create tickets inside Jira or Github. If you have a need for a more specialized Workflow Node

Closing

If you want a simple and lightweight error reporting tool we encourage you to try out `apptive_grid_error_reporting`. Also if you want to use ApptiveGrid for the backend of your Apps check out our other ApptiveGrid Flutter Packages.