Abstract:
Despite over thirty years of work, error-handling is often unsatisfactory in typical software. This paper proposes a framework for user-oriented forward error recovery: a set of entities able to carry out recovery, strategies they may use and derived from these a set of informational requirements needed for such recovery. The informational requirements are concretized into a generic exception class and its use in error reporting and recovery detailed. A version of framework has been used in a medium-size (500 KLOC) business support system with good results. The framework has been expanded based on these results and literature.
The purpose of this website is to serve as a discussion ground for error-handling in the real world. My long term goal is to write a book on the topic: be warned, ideas in your comments may become material for that book.
- Introduction
- Synopsis
- Preliminaries
- Requirements and guidelines for an exception handling framework
- What is exception handling: a framework
- Informational requirement ⟨Inputs⟩: what input was erroneous, and how it should be fixed
- Something is wrong with the environment ⟨Environmental⟩
- Messages to humans ⟨Message⟩: ⟨User Message⟩, ⟨Administrator Message⟩, ⟨Programmer Message⟩ and levels
- Just retry ⟨Retriable⟩
- Where’s the bug in the program ⟨Program⟩
- Tell me exactly what went wrong ⟨Error Code⟩
- SIDEBAR: Exceptions and error codes
- Which part failed ⟨Subsystem⟩
- Many exceptions? ⟨Next Exception⟩
- Warnings ⟨Severity⟩
- Conclusions, implementation notes and future research topics
- So what should exceptions look like, then
- Should we allow for derivation?
- SIDEBAR: Error logs, error dumps and security
- Handling the exceptions
- Implementation in ⟨CCF⟩
- Notes on implementing ⟨Inputs⟩
- Conclusions and future work
- Bibliography
Mika Raento 2006-07-30