Question

I have a simple question for you (i hope) 🙂

I have pretty much always used void as a “return” type when doing CRUD operations on data.

Eg. Consider this code:

public void Insert(IAuctionItem item) {
    if (item == null) {
        AuctionLogger.LogException(new ArgumentNullException("item is null"));
    }

    _dataStore.DataContext.AuctionItems.InsertOnSubmit((AuctionItem)item);
    _dataStore.DataContext.SubmitChanges();
}

and then considen this code:

public bool Insert(IAuctionItem item) {
    if (item == null) {
        AuctionLogger.LogException(new ArgumentNullException("item is null"));
    }

    _dataStore.DataContext.AuctionItems.InsertOnSubmit((AuctionItem)item);
    _dataStore.DataContext.SubmitChanges();

    return true;
}

It actually just comes down to whether you should notify that something was inserted (and went well) or not ?

Answer 1

I typically go with the first option there.

Given your code, if something goes wrong with the insert there will be an Exception thrown.

Since you have no try/catch block around the Data Access code, the calling code will have to handle that Exception…thus it will know both if and why it failed. If you just returned true/false, the calling code will have no idea why there was a failure (it may or may not care).