back to the future - Page 205

What to Return? Error String, Bool with Error String Out, or Void with Exception

- by Ranger Pretzel

I spend most of my time in C# and am trying to figure out which is the best practice for handling an exception and cleanly return an error message from a called method back to the calling method. For example, here is some ActiveDirectory authentication code. Please imagine this Method as part of a Class (and not just a standalone function.) bool IsUserAuthenticated(string domain, string user, string pass, out errStr) { bool authentic = false; try { // Instantiate Directory Entry object DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + domain, user, pass); // Force connection over network to authenticate object nativeObject = entry.NativeObject; // No exception thrown? We must be good, then. authentic = true; } catch (Exception e) { errStr = e.Message().ToString(); } return authentic; } The advantages of doing it this way are a clear YES or NO that you can embed right in your If-Then-Else statement. The downside is that it also requires the person using the method to supply a string to get the Error back (if any.) I guess I could overload this method with the same parameters minus the "out errStr", but ignoring the error seems like a bad idea since there can be many reasons for such a failure... Alternatively, I could write a method that returns an Error String (instead of using "out errStr") in which a returned empty string means that the user authenticated fine. string AuthenticateUser(string domain, string user, string pass) { string errStr = ""; try { // Instantiate Directory Entry object DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + domain, user, pass); // Force connection over network to authenticate object nativeObject = entry.NativeObject; } catch (Exception e) { errStr = e.Message().ToString(); } return errStr; } But this seems like a "weak" way of doing things. Or should I just make my method "void" and just not handle the exception so that it gets passed back to the calling function? void AuthenticateUser(string domain, string user, string pass) { // Instantiate Directory Entry object DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + domain, user, pass); // Force connection over network to authenticate object nativeObject = entry.NativeObject; } This seems the most sane to me (for some reason). Yet at the same time, the only real advantage of wrapping those 2 lines over just typing those 2 lines everywhere I need to authenticate is that I don't need to include the "LDAP://" string. The downside with this way of doing it is that the user has to put this method in a try-catch block. Thoughts? Is there another way of doing this that I'm not thinking of?

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