How to catch exceptions from a Spout

[Alexis Sukrieh <su...@gmail.com>]

Hi there,

First of all, as this is my first message to the list, I'd like to thank
you all for Storm, this project is impressive and is very interesting. I'm
glad I found it for the new project I'm working on! It's a pleasure to
learn how to master it.

Here comes my first questions.

I've built a topology with a Spout that emits tweets from the "Sample"
streaming API, using twitter4j.

This is working fine, but every once in a while, I get an exception from
twitter4j which results in an "unserializable exception" error showing up
in my Storm UI (under the "last error" field).

I'd like to catch that exception but I clearly have no clue where this can
be caught. Anyone has an idea on the good way (if any) to catch exceptions
in a Spout?

Also, my Spout's stats remain empty (0 acked and 0 failed) no matter of my
bolts activities (counters are updated perfectly for them). Is there any
reason for that? I thought the stats for the Spout would be the sum of the
bolts.

Should I ack/fail tuples from the Spout itself? If so, it looks a bit
complicated to implement, it would mean to keep a state somewhere between
bolts and spout. Am I missing something?

Thanks a lot for your help!

-- 
Alexis Sukrieh

http://twitter.com/sukria - http://blog.sukria.net

"People get annoyed when you try to debug them." -- Larry Wall