Troubleshooting

In the event that something goes wrong while using the Kinvey SDK, there are some steps you can take to figure out what the issue might be. The Kinvey SDK will throw an exception when an error occurs, and Kinvey-related exceptions are of type KinveyException.

KinveyException

Exceptions thrown by the Kinvey SDK are of the type KinveyException, and they encompass errors that occur both on the client-side as well as server-side errors. When inspecting a KinveyException, there are 5 fields of interest:

• ErrorCategory
• ErrorCode
• Error
• Description
• Debug

ErrorCategory

The ErrorCategory property is an enumeration which categorizes the high-level grouping of the error. Categories include error areas like ERROR_CLIENT, ERROR_REQUIREMENT and ERROR_DATASTORE_CACHE, and can be useful in understanding the general area in which the error occurred.

ErrorCode

The ErrorCode property provides an enumeration of the specific error that occurred, which when coupled with the ErrorCategory property will reveal exactly what caused the exception. Examples of this include: ERROR_CLIENT_SHARED_CLIENT_NULL, ERROR_REQUIREMENT_HTTPS and ERROR_DATASTORE_CACHE_REFRESH to name a few.

Error

The Error property of the KinveyException provides a sentence description of what the error is. It is essentially a description of what the ErrorCategory and ErrorCode encapsulate.

Description

This property provides more information regarding the error that occurred, and should be used along with the Error to determine what the cause of the issue is.

Debug

The Debug property may provide some insight as to what may have caused this error, and can be used to help in debugging efforts.

Error Reporting

All Kinvey REST APIs return error responses using standard HTTP error codes. The error reporting is designed to make the APIs more usable—easy to implement and debug. Starting with API version 1, error responses are consistent across all REST API endpoints and use a structured format.

Every error response uses a universal dictionary to describe the error. The dictionary may see some updates from time to time but any updates are only expected to add new types of errors. Individual REST API methods will describe any behavior that diverges from the dictionary.

The body of the response contains information on the error. The body is JSON formatted like regular responses. Errors are guaranteed to remain unchanged when using a specific API version. Each error response body contains an HTTP response Status Code and up to three attributes: two mandatory and one optional, as described below.

• The error attribute is always present. It contains a String value representing the error type.
• The StatusCode is the HTTP response code associated with the error.
• The description attribute is always present. It contains a short user-friendly description of the error. You can pass the description up to the application user if you desire. Kinvey deserves the right to change the exact text of a description depending on developer feedback.
• The debug attribute is optional and exists solely to help debug the error. An app may choose to log this debug message if the application is running in debug mode. The Kinvey backend may or may not populate this attribute depending on the exact scenario encountered. The goal with this attribute is to provide useful information that will make it very easy to isolate the root cause and implement a fix.

Please post on our support forums if you have trouble figuring out the cause or solution to an issue, and we can point you in the right direction.