Re: Error message style guide

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Steve Crawford wrote:

> One thing that would be great from a user's perspective (and which might
> reduce the volume of support questions as well) is to uniquely number all
> errors as in:
> Error 1036: the foo could not faz the fleep
>

I agree with the unique codes.
It does make googling for help easier.

This is how informix does it - you get a sqlstate and what they call a
'native error'. Using SQLError (odbc) you can get a one liner about it,
but the real meat comes from either the documentation or from the command
line program "finderr". You give it the native error and it gives you a
paragraph of information about the problem and what options you have.

Plus, if you have a numeric code sent back you can have an error handler
that looks quite a bit nicer -

switch(pgErrorCode)
{
case PG_HDD_ON_FIRE:
die_horrifically();
break;
case PG_UNKNOWN_USER:
tell_user_he_is_dumb();
break;
}

instead of a big pile of strcmp's.

From an efficiency standpoint, I don't know if it would have any benefit
of sending back a native code and have the client ask for the details if
it wants it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Trout <jeff(at)jefftrout(dot)com> http://www.jefftrout.com/
Ronald McDonald, with the help of cheese soup,
controls America from a secret volkswagon hidden in the past
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------