"Programming error" exceptions - Is my approach sound?
- by Medo42
I am currently trying to improve my use of exceptions, and found the important distinction between exceptions that signify programming errors (e.g. someone passed null as argument, or called a method on an object after it was disposed) and those that signify a failure in the operation that is not the caller's fault (e.g. an I/O exception).
As far as I understand, it makes little sense for an immediate caller to actually handle programming error exceptions, he should instead assure that the preconditions are met. Only "outer" exception handlers at task boundaries should catch them, so they can keep the system running if a task fails.
In order to ensure that client code can cleanly catch "failure" exceptions without catching error exceptions by mistake, I create my own exception classes for all failure exceptions now, and document them in the methods that throw them. I would make them checked exceptions in Java.
Now I have a few questions: Before, I tried to document all exceptions that a method could throw, but that sometimes creates an unwiedly list that needs to be documented in every method up the call chain until you can show that the error won't happen. Instead, I document the preconditions in the summary / parameter descriptions and don't even mention what happens if they are not met. The idea is that people should not try to catch these exceptions explicitly anyway, so there is no need to document their types. Would you agree that this is enough?
Going further, do you think all preconditions even need to be documented for every method? For example, calling methods in IDisposable objects after calling Dispose is an error, but since IDisposable is such a widely used interface, can I just assume a programmer will know this? A similar case is with reference type parameters where passing null makes no conceivable sense: Should I document "non-null" anyway? IMO, documentation should only cover things that are not obvious, but I am not sure where "obvious" ends.
