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Message:

Where to catch exceptions

Posted by mitch gart on 14 Jul 1998, 9:46 AM

Bill Venners wrote:

> My own thought is that one should catch exceptions in the
> method that knows how to handle that exception, and that is
> usually going to be at the application level. Exceptions let
> you transfer control from the part of a program where an
> error or problem is detected to another part of the program
> that knows how to handle the error.

This is good as far as it goes but I wonder about how locally
you should catch exceptions. Suppose you have a method that
makes several calls to an API, and each call can throw a couple
of different exceptions. Do you put a little try-catch block
around each call, or a big one around the whole method? Any
style guidelines? Thanks.