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@jefftrout.com> http://www.jefftrout.com/ Ronald McDonald, with the help of cheese
soup, controls America from a secret volkswagon hidden in the past
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