[erlang-questions] Why does this crash?

[Robert Raschke]

Hi Vinal,

the process that starts the server is linked to it. In your example that is
the shell process. The exception due to the pattern mismatch kills your
shell and therefore also your linked server.

The "real" way to run a server is in a supervision tree. There it us the
supervision process that starts your server and can react to it crashing.
(Or if you don't care about error propagation, you could start your server
without linking.)

If you need to handle a termination of your server, for example to do some
cleanup, then your server needs to "trap exits".

I realise that all of this can be a bit overwhelming when first starting
out on the OTP behaviours. Reading and re-reading the behaviour docs (
http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/users_guide.html) and playing
around with small systems like your example will get you there.

Hth,
Robby
On Sep 27, 2015 9:30 AM, "Vimal Kumar" <vimal7370@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Erlang newbie here. This is my first attempt to write an OTP module myself
> - a simple bank server. API functions allow users to register, login,
> deposit/withdraw money to/from their own account.
>
> The bank_server:login/2 function returns a secret key (sort of unique
> session id, lets assume) which is required for further meaningful
> transactions (like bank_server:deposit/3 or bank_server:withdraw/3).
>
> 1> bank_server:start_link().
> {ok,<0.549.0>}
>
> 2> whereis(bank_server).
> <0.549.0>
>
> 3> bank_server:new_user(user1, "mysecretpass1").
> {ok}
>
> 4> {_, SecretKey1} = bank_server:login(user1, "mysecretpass1").
> {ok,"lYWrBFIi7CoeYN8KSK3QgA=="}
>
> 5> bank_server:deposit(user1, SecretKey1, 10.00).
> {ok,success}
>
> 6> bank_server:check_balance(user1, SecretKey1).
> {ok,10.0}
>
> 7> bank_server:new_user(user2, "mysecretpass2").
> {ok}
>
> 8> {_, SecretKey1} = bank_server:login(user2, "mysecretpass2").
> ** exception error: no match of right hand side value {ok,
> "vYaWQbNQvROqXybVf424lQ=="}
>
> 9> whereis(bank_server).
> undefined
>
> In line 8, I understand that I should have used a different variable,
> since SecretKey1 already has a value. But I am curious why a simple mistake
> *** from client side *** crashed the server itself? Is there any way to
> avoid it?
>
> I am yet to learn OTP supervisors, but I believe it might have restarted
> the server without any delay in such a crash.
>
> The complete code for bank_server.erl is available at
> http://pastebin.com/4bMWjNG7 to check.
>
> Thank you!
>
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>
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