Should I remove e.printStackTrace() from my code before publishing

android exception logging production
jax picture jax · Jan 15, 2010 · Viewed 20.3k times · Source

I was reading the the Android Publishing docs and they said to remove all Log calls from my code. I have some calls to e.printStackTrace() in my code that can be printed as part of the normal running of my program (ie. if a file does not exist yet).

Should I also remove these calls?

Answer

Christopher Orr picture Christopher Orr · Jan 15, 2010

You shouldn't be using e.printStackTrace() directly anyway — doing so will send the info to the Android log without displaying which application (log tag) it came from.

As others have mentioned, continue to catch the Exception in question, but use one of the android.util.Log methods to do the logging. You could log only the message, but not the stack trace, or use verbose logging for the stack trace:

try {
    Object foo = null;
    foo.toString();
} catch (NullPointerException ex) {
    Log.w(LOG_TAG, "Foo didn't work: "+ ex.getMessage());
    Log.d(LOG_TAG, Util.stackTraceWriter(ex));
}

You should strip DEBUG or VERBOSE log messages from your production builds. The easiest way is to use ProGuard to remove Log.[dv] calls from your code.

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