Error Handling: Handle google sheet errors so the app won't crash

[Alex-Cannon]

Our goal is to handle google sheet errors instead of the app crashing. Currently, if data is not formatted correctly, we have potential for 0 categories to work!

There are a decent amount of changes we need to make for this to work properly. I listed them below:

1. Create category validation utils Error handling: Extract and test sheet validation logic #52
2. Handle errors globally Error Handling: setup error handling across the app #51
3. Create base error page Error Handling: Create base Error page #53

[airandfingers]

I could look at this, but I'd probably need access to the spreadsheet, and it'd help to have examples of the kinds of errors that have occurred in the past.

[Alex-Cannon]

@airandfingers I'll send you a link on slack.

The spreadsheet repeats titles of categories, non-profits, tags, etc. Issues can occur when these variables don't match up between the different pages of the sheet.

For example, I had an issue, where the pet-health category was defined on the "root" sheet (which we reference in the other sheets) was misspelled in another page. This broke displaying categories on the home page.

I think the best way for you to reproduce some of these errors is to...

1. Create your own google spreadsheet & api key. Copy our data over (our api key is read-only)
2. Try misspelling categories, titles, etc.
3. See if there are errors

Basically, if there is a category / other data inputed incorrectly that breaks the app, we should catch those errors and handle them. Ideally, we have some error message on the app that says something along the lines of "Category XYZ had invalid data. Please contact your site administrator."

I imagine this happening by creating a "checkCategoryValid" function in the helpers.js file. We also want to have some tests for this.

[airandfingers]

FYI I've started the fix at airandfingers#1, but it has plenty more changes/tests to add before it's ready to merge.

In the meantime, if you like I could create a PR to this repo's master instead, maybe tagging it with something like "in progress" or "not ready for review".. I've found this to be useful at work if I ever need help/feedback while still developing functionality.

[Alex-Cannon]

Sure, go ahead and make a pr. We can just merge when it’s ready.

[Alex-Cannon]

I made this issue a milestone, so I'm closing it