Delphi obtain stack trace after exception

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to obtain a stack trace after an exception is thrown in Delphi. However, when I try to read the stack in the Application.OnException event using the function below, the stack already seems to be flushed and replaced by the throwing procedures.

function GetStackReport: AnsiString;
var
    retaddr, walker: ^pointer;
begin

    // ...

    // History of stack, ignore esp frame
    asm
        mov walker, ebp
    end;

    // assume return address is present above ebp
    while Cardinal(walker^) <> 0 do begin
        retaddr := walker;
        Inc(retaddr);
        result := result + AddressInfo(Cardinal(retaddr^));
        walker := walker^;
    end;
end;

Here's what kind of results I'm getting:

001A63E3: TApplication.HandleException (Forms)
00129072: StdWndProc (Classes)
001A60B0: TApplication.ProcessMessage (Forms)

That's obviously not what I'm looking for, although it's correct. I'd like to retrieve the stack as it was just before the exception was thrown, or in other words the contents before (after would do too) the OnException call.

Is there any way to do that?

I am aware that I'm reinventing the wheel, because the folks over at madExcept/Eurekalog/jclDebug have already done this, but I'd like to know how it's done.

Answer 1

It is not possible to manually obtain a viable stack trace from inside the OnException event. As you have already noticed, the stack at the time of the error is already gone by the time that event is triggered. What you are looking for requires obtaining the stack trace at the time the exception is raised. Third-party exception loggers, like MadExcept, EurekaLog, etc handle those details for you by hooking into key functions and core exception handlers inside of the RTL itself.

In recent Delphi versions, the SysUtils.Exception class does have public StackTrace and StackInfo properties now, which would be useful in the OnException event except for the fact that Embarcadero has chosen NOT to implement those properties natively for unknown reasons. It requires third-party exception loggers to assign handlers to various callbacks exposed by the Exception class to generate stack trace data for the properties. But if you have JclDebug installed, for instance, then you could provide your own callback handlers in your own code that use JCL's stack tracing functions to generate the stack data for the properties.