Cosmo ChangeFeed -Errors,exceptions and Service fail scenario's - azure-cosmosdb

Question

All,
I am using Change Feed Processor Library.Want to know the best way to handle service failure along with the exceptions/errors scenario's in ProcessChangesAsync method. Below are the events am referring to.
1) Service failure - Service having the processor library crashed in the middle of some operation. How to start the process from the same document(doc on failure instance)? is there any inbuilt mechanism where change feed will start with the last failed documents? E.g. Let assume,in current batch we have 10 docs.5 processed successfully and then service breaks because of network failure or by some other reasons.Will my process starts with 6th document once service is re-started? How to achieve this?
2) Exception and Errors- Any errors in ProcessChangesAsync method can be handle using try catch at the global level but how to persist those failure records and make them available for the next batch? Again,looking for any available inbuilt mechanism in change feed process.

Answer 1

1) The Processor Library, by default, checkpoints after a successful run of ProcessChangesAsync. In the latest library version, you can customize the Checkpointer to do manual checkpoints in case you need it. If for some reason the processor shuts down before checkpointing, then it will start processing next from the the last successful checkpoint stored in the Leases collection. In your case, it will start with the first document again, so you will never lose a change but you could experience double processing (this is an "at least once" model).
2) There is no built-in mechanism that you can leverage, handling exceptions within the ProcessChangesAsync is your responsibility. You could not only add a global try/catch but, in the case you are looping over the documents, add a try/catch inside the loop, to handle a failing document (maybe send it to queue for later analysis/post-process) without losing the batch. If you require logging for those errors (I'm assuming that's what you mean by persisting errors?), then the latest version is compatible with LibLog, so plugging your own custom logging is as simple as:
using Microsoft.Azure.Documents.ChangeFeedProcessor.Logging;
var hostName = "SampleHost";
var tracelogProvider = new TraceLogProvider(); //You can use any provider supported by LibLog
using (tracelogProvider.OpenNestedContext(hostName))
{
LogProvider.SetCurrentLogProvider(tracelogProvider);
// After this, create IChangeFeedProcessor instance and start/stop it.
}
Source
Extra info for the comments
To avoid exceptions halting the batch or causing a batch to be reprocessed, you can have handling like this:
public async Task ProcessChangesAsync(IChangeFeedObserverContext context, IReadOnlyList<Document> documents, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
try
{
foreach(var document in documents)
{
try
{
// Do your work for the document
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
// Something happened with the current document, handle it, send it to a queue / another storage to analyze, log it. This catch will make the loop continue with the next.
}
}
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
// Something unhandled happened, log it and avoid throwing it again so the next batch is processed
}
}