我为我的应用程序不期望的每个条件创建了异常。UserNameNotValidException, PasswordNotCorrectException等。

然而,我被告知我不应该为这些条件创造例外。在我的UML中,那些是主要流程的异常,那么为什么它不应该是异常呢?

是否有创建异常的指导或最佳实践?


当前回答

如果用户名无效或密码不正确,这不是一个例外。这些都是在正常操作流程中应该预料到的事情。异常不属于正常程序操作的一部分,而且相当罕见。

我不喜欢使用异常,因为仅仅通过查看调用就无法判断一个方法是否引发了异常。这就是为什么只有当你不能以一种体面的方式处理这种情况时才应该使用异常(比如“内存不足”或“电脑着火了”)。

其他回答

在决定异常是否合适时,需要考虑一些有用的事情:

what level of code you want to have run after the exception candidate occurs - that is, how many layers of the call stack should unwind. You generally want to handle an exception as close as possible to where it occurs. For username/password validation, you would normally handle failures in the same block of code, rather than letting an exception bubble up. So an exception is probably not appropriate. (OTOH, after three failed login attempts, control flow may shift elsewhere, and an exception may be appropriate here.) Is this event something you would want to see in an error log? Not every exception is written to an error log, but it's useful to ask whether this entry in an error log would be useful - i.e., you would try to do something about it, or would be the garbage you ignore.

一个经验法则是在您通常无法预测的情况下使用异常。例如数据库连接、磁盘上丢失的文件等。对于您可以预测的场景,例如用户试图使用错误的密码登录,您应该使用返回布尔值的函数,并知道如何优雅地处理这种情况。您不希望仅仅因为有人输入了密码错误而抛出异常,从而突然结束执行。

我对异常的使用有哲学问题。基本上,您期待一个特定的场景发生,但不是明确地处理它,而是将问题推到“其他地方”处理。至于“其他地方”在哪里,谁也说不准。

To my mind, the fundamental question should be whether one would expect that the caller would want to continue normal program flow if a condition occurs. If you don't know, either have separate doSomething and trySomething methods, where the former returns an error and the latter does not, or have a routine that accepts a parameter to indicate whether an exception should be thrown if it fails). Consider a class to send commands to a remote system and report responses. Certain commands (e.g. restart) will cause the remote system to send a response but then be non-responsive for a certain length of time. It is thus useful to be able to send a "ping" command and find out whether the remote system responds in a reasonable length of time without having to throw an exception if it doesn't (the caller would probably expect that the first few "ping" attempts would fail, but one would eventually work). On the other hand, if one has a sequence of commands like:

  exchange_command("open tempfile");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("close tempfile");
  exchange_command("copy tempfile to realfile");

人们会希望任何操作的失败都能中止整个序列。虽然可以检查每个操作以确保操作成功,但如果命令失败,让exchange_command()例程抛出异常会更有帮助。

实际上,在上面的场景中,有一个参数来选择一些失败处理模式可能会有所帮助:从不抛出异常,仅为通信错误抛出异常,或者在命令没有返回“成功”指示的任何情况下抛出异常。

我认为只有在无法摆脱当前状态时才应该抛出异常。例如,如果您正在分配内存,但没有任何内存可以分配。在您提到的情况下,您可以清楚地从这些状态中恢复,并相应地将错误代码返回给调用者。


You will see plenty of advice, including in answers to this question, that you should throw exceptions only in "exceptional" circumstances. That seems superficially reasonable, but is flawed advice, because it replaces one question ("when should I throw an exception") with another subjective question ("what is exceptional"). Instead, follow the advice of Herb Sutter (for C++, available in the Dr Dobbs article When and How to Use Exceptions, and also in his book with Andrei Alexandrescu, C++ Coding Standards): throw an exception if, and only if

没有满足先决条件(通常会出现以下情况之一 不可能的)或 替代方案将无法满足后置条件或 替代方案将无法保持不变式。

为什么这样更好呢?它不是用几个关于前置条件,后置条件和不变量的问题代替了这个问题吗?这是更好的几个相关的原因。

Preconditions, postconditions and invariants are design characteristics of our program (its internal API), whereas the decision to throw is an implementation detail. It forces us to bear in mind that we must consider the design and its implementation separately, and our job while implementing a method is to produce something that satisfies the design constraints. It forces us to think in terms of preconditions, postconditions and invariants, which are the only assumptions that callers of our method should make, and are expressed precisely, enabling loose coupling between the components of our program. That loose coupling then allows us to refactor the implementation, if necessary. The post-conditions and invariants are testable; it results in code that can be easily unit tested, because the post-conditions are predicates our unit-test code can check (assert). Thinking in terms of post-conditions naturally produces a design that has success as a post-condition, which is the natural style for using exceptions. The normal ("happy") execution path of your program is laid out linearly, with all the error handling code moved to the catch clauses.