Hi guys!

Let's assume we have the following method in the business layer. What's the best practice to tell the UI layer that something went wrong and give also the error message? Should the method return an empty String when it was OK, otherwise the error message, or should it throw another exception in the catch code wrapping the caught exception? If we choose the second variant then the UI should have another try,catch which is too much try,catch maybe. Here is a pseudocode for the first variant.

public String updateSomething()
{
   try
   {
      //Begin transaction here
      dataLayer.do1();
      dataLayer.do2();
      dataLayer.doN();
   }
   catch(Exception exc)
   {
      //Rollback transaction code here
      return exc.message;
   }

   return "";
 }

Is this a good practice or should I throw another exception in the catch(then the method will be void)?