Question

I trying to improve my skills using Try Catch blocks and better error handling.

I have a class that performs a common task, in this case retrieving a Facebook AccessToken. If successful, I want to return the AccessToken string, if not I want to return an error message. These are both strings, so no problem. But when checking the return value on the calling side of the code, how can you do this effectively?

It’s like I need to return 2 values. In the case of a successful attempt, return = true, “ACESSCODEACXDJGKEIDJ”, or if it fails, return = false, “Ooops, there was an error” + ex.ToString();

Then checking the return value is easy (in theory). I could think of returning simply a true/false for return and then setting a Session variable for the strings.

What is a way to return multiple results from a method?

Answer 1

Create a Result class and return that instead…

public class Result
{
   public bool Success {get;set;}
   public string AccessToken {get;set;}
   public string ErrorMessage {get;set;}
}


public Result GetFacebookToken()
{
   Result result = new Result();

   try{
      result.AccessToken = "FACEBOOK TOKEN";
      result.Success = true;
   }
   catch(Exception ex){
      result.ErrorMessage = ex.Message;
      result.Success = false;
   }

   return result;
}

Then you can call this code like…

Result result = GetFacebookToken();

if(result.Success)
{
   //do something with result.AccessToken
}
else
{
   //do something with result.ErrorMessage 
}