Re: [Waterken-server] Errors of Declaration

[Sandro M. <naa...@gm...>]

On 5/26/06, Tyler Close <tyl...@gm...> wrote:
> There is no requirement that the error enumeration be exhaustive. This
> list of errors is just saying: "Here's a list of errors I might return
> and that you might want to treat specially. I might also return some
> other kind of error, and you'll just have to cope with that using a
> generic error handling strategy." In a mutually suspicious,
> distributed setting, a client can't rely on a server only returning
> certain kinds of errors, so an error list can only be advisory.

Well that's a relief. :-)

> The errors are not mandatory, but they are very useful when writing
> client code, if some errors should be handled in different ways.
> Surely there must be some way in C# for an object to tell its clients
> about different kinds of errors they might want to handle?

Documentation. As with javadoc comments, there is a section for
declaring exceptions, but obviously this is dependent on the developer
taking the time to fill it in.

> > However, this is very error-prone and the developer will likely miss
> > exceptions; exceptions thrown from underlying method calls will be the
> > most likely culprits.
>
> Go with whatever the convention is in C# for documenting the errors
> returned by a method.

These are not programmatically accessible however, so the dynamic
serialization of a method will not contain an error enumeration. I
would have to devise some strategy to extract the declared exceptions
from the comments, or as I first suggested, have the user declare the
exceptions via attributes decorating the methods.

Sandro