Page refresh in case of javascript errors

Question

I have some pages running javascript for displaying updates of different measure values. These stuff seems to run fine. But - there is always the risk that javascript can crash in case of a fault (especially after running some hours)

So I want to implement a simple kind of watch dog. One of my ideas is to use a meta-refresh-tag. The Browser will reload the site after xy minutes and all javascripts will be reinitalized.

Of course I do not want to refresh the site if no error occured and want to reset the refresh timer using javascript. As long js runs the timer will be resetted periodally. If javascript crashs the meta-refresh-timer counts down to zero and the page will be reloaded.

Reading stackoverflow postings I have found some answers that says a reset of the meta-timer by javascript is not possible. Do you know a better way to implement the watchdog? Using javascript ittself for refreshing is useless: If the script crashs it will never fire a reload event..

Answer 1

Ideally you should properly handle the error instead of just reloading the page. However you could use the window.onerror event like this:

window.onerror = function() {
    location.reload();
}

More information about onerror here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/DOM/window.onerror