RE: [CFCDev] CFC return types

[Dawson, Michael]

This all goes back to the "contract" of what is agreed upon by the client and the service.  If my client agrees that the service will throw an exception, the contract states that the client will check for that exception.

 

Take this function call, for example:  #parseDateTime("M!ke")#

 

ColdFusion throws an error.  CF does "not" return "M!ke" as the date nor does it return "" or null.

 

In this case, I can test for a valid date using isDate("M!ke") or I can wrap it in a try/catch block.  However, I can't always be certain that I'm passing a valid date/time string to the parseDateTime() function.

 

I can't imagine creating a database-related function that returns "0" or "" if the database server was unavailable.  That is just flat-out lying to the client code.

 

M!ke

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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mihai Manuta
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 7:14 AM
To: CFCDev@cfczone.org
Subject: Re: [CFCDev] CFC return types

Another reason behind not using exceptions as part of the logic inside you application (beside the performance issues so nicely outlined by Vince and the logic issues outlined by Hal) is the fact that you expect your object oriented code to be reusable. That is you get to create it and there are other 10-20 (100?) coders that use it to implement other functionalities in the product. They don't care about the code you did, they just want it to work in a way that is expected.
Given the most used practice in the OOP is to return null (or a NullObject) when you don't have anything to return (and you don't have an error, there is just nothing there to give back...) it seems only reasonable for other developers to expect you to do that.

Just my 2c...

mihaimm


On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 23:52 -0700, Barney Boisvert wrote:

asking a person to give you a reference to their non-existant spouse

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