Question

I have been writing .NET applications and have been impressed with the error handling included in the framework.

When catching an error that has been throw by the processes or somewhere in the code I like to include the message (ex.Message, which is usually pretty general) but also the stacktrace (ex.stacktrace) which helps to trace the problem back to a specific spot.

For a simple example let’s say for instance that we are recording numbers to a log in a method:

public void ExampleMethod(int number){
    try{
        int num = number
        ...open connection to file
        ...write number to file
    }
    catch(Exception ex){
        .... deal with exception (ex.message,ex.stacktrace etc...)
    }
    finally{
    ...close file connection
    }
}

Is there any way to see the method called (in this case ExampleMethod) with the specific number that was passed that potentially crashed the method call? I believe you could log this perhaps in the catch block but I am interested essentially in catching the method call and parameters that caused the system to throw the exception.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I suggest stuffing the parameter values into the exception’s Data dictionary, e.g.

public void ExampleMethod(int number) {
try {
    int num = number
    ...open connection to file
    ...write number to file
}
catch(Exception ex) {
    ex.Data["number"] = number;
    //.... deal with exception (ex.message,ex.stacktrace etc...)
}
finally {
    //...close file connection
}

Another advantage of this method is that you can stuff the parameters in the catch block, then re-throw the exception and log it somewhere else without losing the stack trace, e.g.

catch(Exception ex) {
    ex.Data["number"] = number;
    throw;
}