Question

I’ve been wondering why would I use Exceptions in my PHP. Let’s take a look at a simple example:

class Worker
{
 public function goToWork()
 {
  return $isInThatMood ?
  // Okay, I'll do it.
  true : 
  // In your dreams...
  false;
 }
}

$worker = new Worker;
if (!$worker->goToWork())
{
 if (date('l',time()) == 'Sunday')
  echo "Fine, you don't have to work on Sundays...";
 else
  echo "Get your a** back to work!";
}
else
 echo "Good.";

Is there a reason for me to use Exceptions for that kind of code? Why? How would the code be built?

And what about code that may produce errors:

class FileOutputter
{
 public function outputFile($file)
 {
  if (!file_exists($file))
   return false;
  return file_get_contents($file);
 }
}

Why would I use Exceptions in the above case? I have a feeling that Exceptions help you to recognize the type of the problem, which occured, true?

So, am I using Exceptions appropriately in this code:

class FileOutputter
{
 public function outputFile($file)
 {
  if (!file_exists($file))
   return throw new Exception("File not found.",123);
  try
  {
   $contents = file_get_contents($file);
  }
  catch (Exception $e)
  {
   return $e;
  }
  return $contents;
 }
}

Or is that poor? Now the underlying code can do this:

$fo = new FileOutputter;
try
{
 $fo->outputFile("File.extension");
}
catch (Exception $e)
{
 // Something happened, we could either display the error/problem directly
 echo $e->getMessage();
 // Or use the info to make alternative execution flows
 if ($e->getCode() == 123) // The one we specified earlier
  // Do something else now, create "an exception"
}

Or am I completely lost here?

Answer 1

When should I use an exception?

You use an exception to indicate an exceptional condition; that is, something which prevents a method from fulfilling its contract, and which shouldn’t have occurred at that level.

For example, you might have a method, Record::save(), which saves changes to a record into a database. If, for some reason, this can’t be done (e.g. a database error occurs, or a data constraint is broken), then you could throw an exception to indicate failure.

How do I create custom exceptions?

Exceptions are usually named such that they indicate the nature of the error, for example, DatabaseException. You can subclass Exception to create custom-named exceptions in this manner, e.g.

class DatabaseException extends Exception {}

(Of course, you could take advantage of inheritance to give this exception some additional diagnostic information, such as connection details or a database error code, for example.)

When shouldn’t I use an exception?

Consider a further example; a method which checks for file existence. This should probably not throw an exception if the file doesn’t exist, since the purpose of the method was to perform said check. However, a method which opens a file and performs some processing could throw an exception, since the file was expected to exist, etc.

Initially, it’s not always clear when something is and isn’t exceptional. Like most things, experience will teach you, over time, when you should and shouldn’t throw an exception.

Why use exceptions instead of returning special error codes, etc?

The useful thing about exceptions is that they immediately leap out of the current method and head up the call stack until they’re caught and handled, which means you can move error-handling logic higher up, although ideally, not too high.

By using a clear mechanism to deal with failure cases, you automatically kick off the error handling code when something bad happens, which means you can avoid dealing with all sorts of magic sentinel values which have to be checked, or worse, a global error flag to distinguish between a bunch of different possibilities.