NPE when statement parameters do not match

[natashadsilva]

I had a tuple with an attribute called USER_AGNT but the prepared statement for the JDBCRun operator was expecting USER_AGENT.

statement: "INSERT INTO DS_RESTAPI_BILL_DSCV_EVNT  (DS_REC_ID, ..USER_AGENT...) " +
					"VALUES (?, ?,?,?,?,?,?,?)"; 
statementParamAttrs: "DS_REC_ID, USER_AGENT...." ;

This caused an error but the logs were not helpful because it just mentioned an NPE but there was no stack trace:

#splapptrc,J[217],P[418],BillEvents_ToDB2,#splapptrc,J[217],P[418],BillEvents_ToDB2,spl_operator M[PEImpl.cpp:handleOperatorFailure:684]  - CDISR5030E: An exception occurred during the execution of the BillEvents_ToDB2 operator. The exception is: java.lang.NullPointerException
11 Feb 2021 22:31:38.793+0000 [95] ERROR spl_metric M[OperatorMetricsImpl.cpp:dumpMetricAtExit:144]  - The Number of tuples submitted (port 0) metric of the DBRecordMakerTimerSignal operator has a value of 2952 at exit.

After I set up the debugger I found the exception was here and the error handling was here

This is a simple typo but it could happen. Could we make the following improvements:

• if the statement attribute does not have a matching splAttribute it should fail more gracefully and suggest possibly what the problem is
• The error handling for the processTuple function could be improved, because it only said there was a NPE and not where it occurred, and also in the PEC logs there was this: JDBC connection failed. The exception is {0} with size 56 - the string formatting is not correct.

[markheger]

Toolkit release v1.9.0 has improved traces on error level and metrics to improve analysis.

Nevertheless the NPE should be resolved even if caused by using wrong parameters.