Question

I’m developing in the UI layer of an application and an exception is being thrown in the business layer (or lower) after I make a request. The exception looks like the following

“System.Exception: No Data Returned at …”

Which its obvious someone did a simple:

if (...Rows.Count < 1)
    throw new Exception("No Data Returned");

Now in my play ground, should I try to clean this up by trying to rethrow it as a custom exception I can handle specifically as so:

try
{
    var myBusinessObject = MyBusinessMethod();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    if (ex.Message == "No Data Returned")
    {
        throw new NoDataException(ex.Message);
    }
    else
    {
        throw;
    }
}

Or is there a more graceful way of handling these.

Note, I do not have the option of changing code outside of the UI layer and I do expect to run into this particular exception often.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This is a little subjective, but I would rather live with the ugliness of handling a catch (Exception) in my code than worry about what happens if someone changes the error message to something other than No Data Returned.