Question

I have a particularly ugly piece of test code that is calling a number of methods on a hardware device to test it’s capabilities. It needs to gracefully fail in that if any of the methods throw an exception I wan’t the others to still be tested. Is there a more elegant way to represent a block of calls none of which I want to generate an exception?

 ...
 try
 {
     ExternalDevice.Call1();
 }
 catch (Exception e)
 {}
 try
 {
     ExternalDevice.Call2();
 }
 catch (Exception e)
 {}
 try
 {
     ExternalDevice.Call3(); 
 } catch (Exception e)
 {}
 //... many more like this
 ...

Thanks

Answer 1

I don’t recommend doing so, but here is a way:

void Absorb(Action action)
{
     try { action(); } catch { };
}

// ....
Absorb(() => ExternalDevice.Call1());
Absorb(() => ExternalDevice.Call2());
Absorb(() => ExternalDevice.Call3());

Note that, usually, you can use method groups to achieve simpler syntax:

Absorb(ExternalDevice.Call1);
Absorb(ExternalDevice.Call2);
Absorb(ExternalDevice.Call3);

To make it even shorter,

void Absorb(params Action[] actions)
{
     foreach (var action in actions) try { action(); } catch { };
}

So you can

Absorb(ExternalDevice.Call1, ExternalDevice.Call2, ExternalDevice.Call3);