honeybadger.notify: error_message is ignored when an exception is provided

[benjaoming]

Say I want to use a pattern like this:

try:
    launch_rocket(*args)
except Exception as e:
    handle_failure()
    honeybadger.notify(
        error_message=f"Failed to launch rocket: {str(args)}",
        exception=e,
        context={
            "retries": retries,
        },
    )

...then what I get is a correct exception traceback. But the error_message argument isn't found.

[stympy]

Hey @benjaoming — thanks for opening the issue! What you observed is by design... if you provide an exception to notify, the library uses str(exception) to populate the Message field and ignores the error_message argument. I recommend doing something like this:

try:
    launch_rocket(*args)
except Exception as e:
    handle_failure()
    honeybadger.notify(
        exception=e,
        context={
            "retries": retries,
            "args": str(args),  # Add launch args as context instead
        },
    )

[benjaoming]

@stympy understood, but it's a bit confusing that it will happily accept the argument and throw away the data. Not sure what's a good solution, certainly failing the call doesn't seem nice. But maybe automatically adding it to the context would help the misguided dev 😄

[benjaoming]

And thanks for the quick response 🙏

[stympy]

Yeah, I agree that's not a great experience... I like the idea of adding it to the context.

[subzero10]

I'm re-opening the issue to add the error_message to the context when both an error_message and exception are provided.