How to indicate that a method was unsuccessful

Question

I have several similar methods, say eg. CalculatePoint(...) and CalculateListOfPoints(...). Occasionally, they may not succeed, and need to indicate this to the caller. For

Answer 1

Sorry, I just remembered the Nullable type, you should look at that. I am not too sure what the overhead is though.

Answer 2

Using an exception is a bad idea in some cases (especially when writing a server). You would need two flavors of the method. Also look at the dictionary class for an indication of what you should do.

// NB:  A bool is the return value. 
//      This makes it possible to put this beast in if statements.
public bool TryCalculatePoint(... out Point result) { }

public Point CalculatePoint(...)
{
   Point result;
   if(!TryCalculatePoint(... out result))
       throw new BogusPointException();
   return result;
}

Best of both worlds!

Answer 3

Why would they fail? If it's because of something the caller has done (i.e. the arguments provided) then throwing ArgumentException is entirely appropriate. A Try[...] method which avoids the exception is fine.

I think it's a good idea to provide the version which throws an exception though, so that callers who expect that they will always provide good data will receive a suitably strong message (i.e. an exception) if they're ever wrong.

Answer 4

We once wrote an entire Framework where all the public methods either returned true (executed successfully) or false (an error occurred). If we needed to return a value we used output parameters. Contrary to popular belief, this way of programming actually simplified a lot of our code.

Answer 5

Another alternative is to throw an exception. However, you generally only want to throw exceptions in "exceptional cases".

If the failure cases are common (and not exceptional), then you've already listed out your two options. EDIT: There may be a convention in your project as how to handle such non-exceptional cases (whether one should return success or the object). If there is no existing convention, then I agree with lucasbfr and suggest you return success (which agrees with how TryParse(...) is designed).

Answer 6

Well with Point, you can send back Point.Empty as a return value in case of failure. Now all this really does is return a point with 0 for the X and Y value, so if that can be a valid return value, I'd stay away from that, but if your method will never return a (0,0) point, then you can use that.