Question

I’m working on an existing C# program that queries and makes changes to various resources outside of the program and computer that the program is run on. The program works on most computers but randomly fails on random computers every so often. When this happens we have no feedback as to why other than what the user tells us about the exception that was thrown up on the screen that they may or may not have already cleared. Even if they leave it up on the screen for us it provides little to no useful information to us. I have since modified the program to log particular events and gathered information to a text file that I can use to approximate where the program stopped. This is at least a start but from reading many threads on stackoverflow.com as well as other forums I know that the program needs to at least make an attempt to handle the specific exceptions that could come up when querying and modifying LDAP, DS, DNS, SQL and so on.

Currently there is just big try blocks surrounding all of the to do code with just one catch block at the end of each.

private void method_name()
{
    try
    {
       //many lines of to do code calling many other methods
    }
    catch (exception ex)
    {
        MessageBox.Show("An Error has occurred in method_name() :" + ex.Message);
    }

My first thought was to nest more specific try/catch blocks within the larger try blocks but I keep running into problems with variables becoming unreachable in different contexts. for example

try
{
   LdapConnection ldapConn = new LdapConnection();
   ldapConn.Connect(details of connection);
   ldapConn.Bind(details of bind statement);
   LdapSearchQueue queue = ldapConn.Search(search criteria and such);
   LdapMessage message;
}
catch (somesortofexception ex)
{
   //do something sensible about it
}

while ((message = queue.getResponse()) != null)
{
   //do things with message
}
ldapConn.Disconnect();

the problem being that message and queue are unreachable outside of the try block. This is just one example of something done withing the “//many lines of to do code calling many other methods” that I’m trying to work with.

So here are my questions:

Would it be better to try and make the try block bigger in the above example to include the while loop and ldap disconnect or to just leave the big try loop, make a list of things that happen during that and create many catch blocks at the end to catch specific exceptions? I feel like putting in the smaller try blocks around specific code is the way to go based on what I’ve read on this site.

Should I use the smaller try blocks like I’ve been trying to implement, would be be okay to just use a catch block that catches any exception raised within that small snippet of code and log it to my log file or should I try and catch specific exceptions? I don’t really have anything different I can do with those exceptions other than log them to the file anyways.

Do I need to throw the exceptions? I don’t really want anything bubbling up to the user other than a message in plain english saying that something went wrong and to contact IT. Currently none of the catch blocks throw anything.

Answer 1

About breaking down exceptions, I would always separate the connection code from the query one.

So this would become:

LdapConnection ldapConn = new LdapConnection();
try
{
   ldapConn.Connect(details of connection);
   ldapConn.Bind(details of bind statement);
}
catch (somesortofexception ex)
{
   //Log, send error message..
   ldapConn = null;
}

if (ldapConn != null)
{
    try
    {
         //Do what you need with your connection
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
         //Log, Error....
    }
    finally
    {
        //Disconnect your ldap here
    }
}

Ideally i would put all the connection code and search code in separate methods as well,
so you’ll have some nicer stack trace.

About error message I would also just use some generic message and log exception specifics into some kind of file ( http://logging.apache.org/log4net/ ) is quite nice for having nicely formatted log files.