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Error and No Permission Screen

1 Requirements

In the case of errors or missing permissions the navigation in ILIAS should be improved. We would like to introduce dedicated no-permission and error pages.
 
The no-permission screen should offer

• Information about why no permission is given (e.g. no read permission, offline, time scheduled activation, ...)
• A link to an accessible upper container of the target.
• A link to the source of the link (if possible, we need the ref-id of the source here to generate a perma link)
• The usual main menu section.

The error screen should offer

• Information about the error
• A limited ILIAS GUI (no main menu)
• A link to the personal desktop
• A link to the repository
• Information about contacting an administrator
• Debug information for developers.

PHP errors should be caught if possible using http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-error-handler.php.
 
If a post command is executed but the POST array missing (e.g. cases like http://www.ilias.de/mantis/view.php?id=11157), the error page should be triggered by ilCtrl.

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Not scheduled yet (was Release 4.3)
• Funding: Required
• Development: Feature is to be developed by tbd.

3 Additional Information

• If you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding, please contact: alex.killing (at) gmx.de

4 Discussion

JF 27 May 2013: We support the idea. Implementation could be done for any release before beta as soon as possible (usability fix).

Matthias Kunkel, Aug 14, 2014: The problem still exists. Therefore I add it on the JF agenda again.

CK 10.11.2014: It would be good if this error response would be accompanied by an HTTP status/error code (e.g. 5xx or 418 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP-Statuscode, 418=I'm a teapot ;-)). For automatic testing (jmeter, etc.) this would really help to identify at least these kinds of errors. Of course the most difficult question is, how to map the errors to HTTP status codes.

CK 09.01.2015:

• Note: This request is related Error handling and logging. It has some additional ideas, like
  • Modularization (information on which component triggered an error)
  • error logs that are accessible via administration
  • ...

• And I want to stress again that for automatic testing normal (successful) requests should send 2xx-codes by default, but "error.php" and ilCtrlExceptions should send 5xx - and I think it's likely to get some funding for that, too. :-)
• PS: In the long-term a proper "Request-Response-Model" should make error-handling like this a whole lot easier, even accross different services and end points (SOAP, console, etc.) - I think that might be worth a discussion.

5 Implementation

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