What do I name this class whose sole purpose is to report failure?
- by Blair Holloway
In our system, we have a number of classes whose construction must happen asynchronously. We wrap the construction process in another class that derives from an IConstructor class:
class IConstructor {
public:
virtual void Update() = 0;
virtual Status GetStatus() = 0;
virtual int GetLastError() = 0;
};
There's an issue with the design of the current system - the functions that create the IConstructor-derived classes are often doing additional work which can also fail. At that point, instead of getting a constructor which can be queried for an error, a NULL pointer is returned.
Restructuring the code to avoid this is possible, but time-consuming. In the meantime, I decided to create a constructor class which we create and return in case of error, instead of a NULL pointer:
class FailedConstructor : public IConstructor
public:
virtual void Update() {}
virtual Status GetStatus() { return STATUS_ERROR; }
virtual int GetLastError() { return m_errorCode; }
private: int m_errorCode;
};
All of the above this the setup for a mundane question: what do I name the FailedConstructor class? In our current system, FailedConstructor would indicate "a class which constructs an instance of Failed", not "a class which represents a failed attempt to construct another class".
I feel like it should be named for one of the design patterns, like Proxy or Adapter, but I'm not sure which.
