7 replies to this topic

[Orjan]

Hello people.

I'm doing some OOP work now. finally. now I need to learn to think in this other way, and it isn't easy always.

Now I have come to an conclusion that I don't know what solution I should do, so I ask for help. I do it here in the General part, instead of PHP which I do the programming in, as it really is a design thing only.

I have a class, whatever it does, but in one om my methods, I try to perfom an complex action, and depending on the input data, it can have several different error types, how do I return the error typ easiest? I really want the method to return true on sucess and false on error, but how can I make it in a simple way, to avoid throwing exceptions to right or left, but still get the errors out of there? store the error in an member and create an method to read it out?

[ZekeDragon]

Depends on what you're trying to do. A common practice is to return an int, with zero for success and non-zero (an error code) for failure. However that's common for languages that don't support exception handling, if your chosen language does, I'd really suggest you use the provided exception handling mechanisms. That gives you a greater amount of control over the program and in a way it forces you to deal with the problem rather than silently ignoring it.

[Orjan]

Well, but if it's not that kinda errors, but to provide error messages sent to the user, depending on user input? I don't wanna use plain error message strings here either, as the application might need to support multi-language

[Orjan]

any suggestions on that?

[relapse]

Return an array. The array can be associative and the first index be the error code (success or failure). You can store many things in the rest of the array.

if (array[0] == 0) // error
array[1] // error code
else 
// other code

[Aereshaa]

That might work, relapse, but who allocates the array? Who frees it? If it's on the stack, that means undefined behavior.

[Orjan]

Aereshaa said:

That might work, relapse, but who allocates the array? Who frees it? If it's on the stack, that means undefined behavior.

It's php, you don't need to free memory there as in C/C++

but if it were in C++, your question is relevant...

[WingedPanther]

For C++, you can use a smart pointer to a vector.