CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaexception
DodoFXP
DodoFXP

Reputation: 483

Pattern to let client selectively handle errors in Java

I am writing a wrapper around the DefaultHttpClient to handle some of the error-prone configuration options. For example I will pre-configure everything to handle UTF-8 properly and to shutdown the connection cleanly.

When a non-200 is returned, I thought about the client registering a handler for a specific status code and then calling it.

I would provide some default handlers to take care of simple cases.

Is this a good pattern for a clean API? If I throw exceptions, the client has to handle cases which might not happen at all as I would have to throw an exception per possible HTTP status code (or most).

The thing I like about handlers is that I can provide a couple of 'default handlers' which might be overwritten...

I'd like to hear your input and maybe get some more creative ideas.

Cheers

Upvotes: 0

Views: 122

Answers (2)

Victor Sorokin
Victor Sorokin

Reputation: 12006

Currently, accepted practice for Java APIs is to employ unchecked exceptions, so client won't need to change it's internal code just to accommodate API's exceptions into client's codebase.

Instead, if you use unchecked exceptions, you'll save your code unchanged except the places where you really need to handle exceptions.

Here're slides about Robert Martin's "Clean code" book which talk about error handling best practices: slides.

Upvotes: 3

Robert
Robert

Reputation: 2471

I wouldn't create a different exception for each http error code. At most create one or two general exceptions and store the exact error code as part of the exception. That way if the client code just wants to log or ignore them it can, or it can get more details based on the error code.

Upvotes: 1

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