Question

I would like to code a method inside the following:

namespace WebUx.Helpers.CSharp
{
    public class getExceptionMessage
    {

        < Method here >

        var exError = e.Message;
                    if ( e.InnerException != null ) {
                        exError += "<br>" + e.InnerException.Message;
                        if (e.InnerException.InnerException != null ) {
                            exError += "<br>" + e.InnerException.InnerException.Message;
                        }
                    }
    }
}

Can someone tell me how I should declare the class and method. I get mixed up over how best to declare and I think it should be static but not sure if there is a better way. Note that this method I want to have callable from many places in my code. I think I should probably return a string with the value exError.

Answer 1

In order to avoid those “helper classes” that could be used everywhere in the code I would write an extension method:

public static class ExceptionExtensions
{
    public static string GetFormattedErrorMessage(this Exception e)
    {
        if (e == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("e");
        }

        var exError = e.Message;
        if (e.InnerException != null)
        {
            exError += "<br>" + e.InnerException.Message;
            if (e.InnerException.InnerException != null)
            {
                exError += "<br>" + e.InnerException.InnerException.Message;
            }
        }

        return exError;
    }
}

then:

try
{
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    string msg = ex.GetFormattedErrorMessage();
}

I personally don’t really like all those StringHelper, ExceptionHelper, FormHelper… classes when the only purpose is to provide static methods that are related to a particular type. Extension methods are made for this particular purpose.