When you are in a standalone, a runtime error that would halt execution might be fatal. Try/Catch allows you to handle the error gracefully without presenting the user with an ugly dialog and a QTD afterwards. You can politely inform the user that something has gone wrong and you have to exit the application, after tidying things up a bit if necessary.
Databases can just go away sometimes, like the IT guy deciding it's time to update the servers and restart them while the user is working late on an important project. Setting a repeat loop around a try/catch construct allows you to attempt a reconnect a certain number of times, or present the user with a Retry/Cancel dialog, allowing you to clean up and exit gracefully if necessary. As a case in point, I was having a problem with a low level broadcast storm which was causing the uplinks on our switches to reset (they are designed to do that). Anyone who uses Microsoft SQL knows this can be fatal, depending on how the software is written. Our accounting software was not very well written, and as a result, the end user was subject to a never ending stream of error dialogs allowing a cancel, retry or abort! None of them exited gracefully. ICK!! Had the developer accounted for the possibility that the user could be disconnected from the database, and provided a graceful exit, my reputation would not now be so tarnished, because they all blamed me of course. :-) To the accounting girl's credit however, they did make me brownies when I found the source of the broadcast storm and fixed it. Bob On Mar 22, 2012, at 3:31 PM, Pete wrote: > Sorry to keep this thread going but I'm trying to figure out if I should be > using try/catch more, particularly for database calls. > > As far as I know, you can tell if any of the standard rev db calls fail by > checking their returned value or the result. Are there circumstances where > that's not the case or does SQLYoga silent about errors? > > I have experienced silent datagrid problems that were only revealed by > enclosing the datagrid access statements in try/catch. > > Pete _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
