Laravel Good Practices with Exceptions and Try&Catch Blocks

Question

I'm building a web app where the customers can purchase many different plans and I'm using Stripe API for the payments. When a customer wants to buy a plan, it has to fill the credit card details and the email too. So, I get all this form data in my RegistrationController.

The thing is, I have to do many things in the post method like:

• Check if the selected plan exists (maybe somebody could hack the html form source).
• Create the Stripe Costumer.
• Create the Stripe Subscription for the Customer I've created.
• Create the new Eloquent User, sync the chosen plans and add the Stripe info (Stripe id, etc.) to the User instance.

As I do have to do many steps, I decided to use a Try&Catch block and create custom Exceptions so, if something fails, I'll be able to track where the error happened. The problem is that I end with a messy method in the RegistrationController:

public function postRegistration(RegistrationRequest $request,
                                 StripeCostumer $stripeCustomer,
                                 StripeSubscription $stripeSubscription)
{
    if ($request['training_plan'])
    {

        if ( ! $this->PlanExists($request['training_plan']))
        {
            \Log::alert('Somebody tried to hack the plan: '. 
            $request['email']);

            return response()->json(
                ['error' => \Config::get('variables.104')],
                Response::HTTP_NOT_FOUND);
        }
    }
    try
    {
        $response = $stripeCustomer->createNewStripeCostumer($request);

        $plans = $stripeSubscription->createNewStripeSubscription($response->id, $request);

        $user = $this->userRepo->create($request->all());

        $user->syncUserPlans($plans);

        $this->userRepo->saveStripeInfo($user,$response);

    }
    catch(StripeCustomerNotCreated $e)
    {
        \Log::error('Couldn't create a new Stripe Costumer: '.
            $request['email']);

        return response()->json(
            ['error' => \Config::get('variables.106')],
            Response::HTTP_PAYMENT_REQUIRED);

    }
    catch(StripeSubscriptionNotCreated $e)
    ...
    catch(EloquentUserNotCreated $e)
    ...
    catch(StripeInfoNotSaved $e)
    ...

    event(new UserRegistration($user));

    \Auth::login($user);

    return redirect('/');
}

I didn't wrote every Catch block (I currently have 4-5) but everytime I throw an exception, I have to:

• Undo all the previous actions (creating Stripe Customer, Eloquent User, etc.) so in every Catch the logic gets larger.
• Log the incident.
• Return the error.

This is the example of a method from a service class to manage the Stripe Customers:

public function createNewStripeCustomer($request)
{
    $response = Customer::create(array(
        "description" => "Customer for test@example.com",
        "source" => $request->stripeToken,
        "email" => $request->email,
    ));

    if(true)
    {
        return $response;
    }

    throw new StripeCustomerNotCreated();
}

*If there's any error, I return a JSON like an API.

*I have "variables.php" file in the /Config directory where I save all the error messages.

I tried to save the logic of every Exception in the Handler.php file (using a switch loop) but It doesn't work as I expect. Other option is replacing the try&catch blocks for many if&else or nested try&catch blocks but it's still messy.

What should be the best approach to make this work efficiently?

Answer 1

I finally got a solution handling the Stripe Exceptions (not my custom ones) in the Handler.php. I found this post that may help somebody.