Add plain-language context to error notifications - #1020
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Errors surfaced through handleException often ended up either blank or as a bare technical fragment (e.g. "Could not load your profile" with no explanation, or a raw "SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected end of input"). Add a humanizeError util that recognises common failure shapes (invalid/empty JSON responses, network failures, expired/revoked OAuth grants, known HTTP status codes) and prefixes the description with a plain-language explanation, applied centrally in the HANDLE_EXCEPTION handler so every existing call site benefits. Also: - handleException now falls back to a plain Error object's .message for the description, and no longer throws when data.error is undefined (message derivation had the same unguarded access). - Wrap the JSON.parse of xhr.responseText in HANDLE_EXCEPTION in a try/catch - a non-JSON error response would otherwise throw inside the exception handler itself. - Spotify getMe() and refreshToken() failures now get specific messages pointing at expired/revoked authorization, since that was the actual root cause behind the vague errors we hit in practice. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
jaedb
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Aug 4, 2026
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Nice work! Would be great to explore the viability of moving these human-friendly errors into the translation file, making it accessible for translation.
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| @@ -329,8 +331,9 @@ export function getMe() { | |||
| }, | |||
| (error) => { | |||
| dispatch(coreActions.handleException( | |||
| 'Could not load your profile', | |||
| 'Could not load your Spotify profile', | |||
| error, | |||
| 'This usually means your Spotify authorization has expired or is invalid. Try reconnecting Spotify in Settings.', | |||
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These human-friendly errors would be great to have in the translation file
| if (data.message) { | ||
| message = data.message; | ||
| } else if (data.error.message) { | ||
| } else if (data.error && data.error.message) { |
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This could simply be data.error?.message, no?
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| 0: 'Could not reach the server. Check your network connection, or that the server is running.', | ||
| 400: 'The request was invalid or rejected by the server.', | ||
| 401: 'You are not authenticated, or your session has expired.', | ||
| 403: 'You do not have permission to do that.', | ||
| 404: 'The requested resource could not be found. It may have been removed or renamed.', | ||
| 408: 'The request timed out.', | ||
| 429: 'Too many requests were sent in a short period. Wait a moment and try again.', | ||
| 500: 'The server encountered an internal error.', | ||
| 502: 'The server is temporarily unavailable (bad gateway).', | ||
| 503: 'The server is temporarily unavailable.', | ||
| 504: 'The server took too long to respond (gateway timeout).', |
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These too, could be in the translation file. It may be tricky, given the execution level to apply the t() method though.
… optional chaining - Humanized error explanations now live under errors.* in en.yaml (via i18n()) instead of being hardcoded in JS, so they're translatable like the rest of the UI. - Replace `x && x.y` null checks with optional chaining per review feedback.
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Errors surfaced through handleException often ended up either blank or as a bare technical fragment (e.g. "Could not load your profile" with no explanation, or a raw "SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected end of input"). Add a humanizeError util that recognises common failure shapes (invalid/empty JSON responses, network failures, expired/revoked OAuth grants, known HTTP status codes) and prefixes the description with a plain-language explanation, applied centrally in the HANDLE_EXCEPTION handler so every existing call site benefits.
Also: