Question

The Circuit Breaker pattern, from the book Release It!, protects a remote service from requests while it is failing (or recovering) and helps the client manage repeated remote service failure. I like Davy Brion’s stateful circuit breaker and Ayende’s lazy timeout fix is very clean.

However, I have not seen a lot of implementations of filtering which exceptions will cause an increase in the failure count of a circuit breaker.

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Don’t worry about showing locking, unless your implementation is particularly dependent on clever locking. FYI, Phil Haack appears to have the latest version of TimedLock, used in Davy Brion’s articles.

Answer 1

Filter by Predicate

A predicate can provide extended criteria and filtering logic.

public void AttemptCall(Action action, Predicate<Exception> match)
{
    try
    {
        action();
    }
    catch(Exception e)
    {
        if(match(e))
            state.ActUponException(e);

        throw;
    }
}

For example, you may want to increase the circuit breaker only on a WebException caused by a timeout.

circuitBreaker.AttemptCall(() => service.DoWork(), e =>
    {
        WebException local = e as WebException;
        if(local == null)
            return false;

        return local.Status == WebExceptionStatus.Timeout;
    });