Exception handling using an HttpModule

Question

We\'re reviewing one of the company\'s system\'s exception handling and found a couple of interesting things.

Most of the code blocks (if not all of them) are inside a t

Answer 1

Sounds like the exception that is thrown should not have been implemented as an exception.

Anyway, I would say that since this BaseApplicationException is a general all-purpose exception, it would be good to throw exceptions that are more context-specific. So when you are trying to retrieve an entity from a database, you might want an EntityNotFoundException. This way when you are debugging you do not have to search through inner exceptions and stack traces to find the real issue. If this BAseApplicationException is collecting information on the exception (like keeping track of the inner exception) then this should not be a problem.

I would use the HttpModule only when I could not get any closer to where the exceptions are actually happening in code. You do not really want an HttModule OnError event that is a giant switch statement depending on BaseApplicationexception's error information.

To conclude, it is worth it to throw different exceptions when you can give more specific exceptions that tell you the root of the problem right off the bat.