Re: Best Practices for Exception Handling

[autarch]

Also take a look at Exception::Class, which somewhat overlaps with Error.pm. The two can be used together pretty easily, however.

[adrianh]

I'd add another vote for Exception::Class. It allows exceptions classes to be declared quickly and easily and has become my fave since discovering its existance.

I tend to have a single module that declares all my exceptions. So for my Foo application I'd have something like:

package Foo::Exceptions;
use strict;
use warnings;

use Exception::Class (

    'Foo::Exception::DBI' => {
        description => 'DBI Error',
        # error => $DBI::errstr,
    },

    'Foo::Exception::DBI::Dupe' => {
        description => 'Duplicate key',
        isa => 'Foo::Exception::DBI',
        # error => name of duplicate key,
    },
    
    'Foo::Exception::Dupe' => {
        description => 'Duplicate entry',
        fields => [ 'name' ],
        # error => value of duplicate field
    },

        # etc.

);

Comments are because Exception::Class objects have a default "error" field and I like to document what that should be used for where I declare the class.

Throw exceptions like this:

Foo::Exception::DBI->throw($DBI::errstr)
Foo::Exception::Dupe->throw(name => $name, error => $value);

Because of the closure issues raised by thraxil, I use the eval / if idiom instead of any of the modules that provide extra try/catch syntax.

eval {$foo->something_that_might_die};
if (ref($@)) {
    if ($@->isa('Foo::Exception::Dupe') ) {
        warn "duplicate entry ", $@->name, " ($@)\n"; undef $@;
    };
};
die $@ if $@;