When to throw an exception?

Question

I have exceptions created for every condition that my application does not expect. UserNameNotValidException, PasswordNotCorrectException etc.

However I was told I should not create exceptions for those conditions. In my UML those ARE exceptions to the main flow, so why should it not be an exception?

Any guidance or best practices for creating exceptions?

Answer 1

Security is conflated with your example: You shouldn't tell an attacker that a username exists, but the password is wrong. That's extra information you don't need to share. Just say "the username or password is incorrect."

Answer 2

Exceptions are intended for events that are abnormal behaviors, errors, failures, and such. Functional behavior, user error, etc., should be handled by program logic instead. Since a bad account or password is an expected part of the logic flow in a login routine, it should be able to handle those situations without exceptions.

Answer 3

There are two main classes of exception:

1) System exception (eg Database connection lost) or 2) User exception. (eg User input validation, 'password is incorrect')

I found it helpful to create my own User Exception Class and when I want to throw a user error I want to be handled differently (ie resourced error displayed to the user) then all I need do in my main error handler is check the object type:

            If TypeName(ex) = "UserException" Then
               Display(ex.message)
            Else
               DisplayError("An unexpected error has occured, contact your help  desk")                   
               LogError(ex)
            End If

Answer 4

My personal guideline is: an exception is thrown when a fundamental assumption of the current code block is found to be false.

Example 1: say I have a function which is supposed to examine an arbitrary class and return true if that class inherits from List<>. This function asks the question, "Is this object a descendant of List?" This function should never throw an exception, because there are no gray areas in its operation - every single class either does or does not inherit from List<>, so the answer is always "yes" or "no".

Example 2: say I have another function which examines a List<> and returns true if its length is more than 50, and false if the length is less. This function asks the question, "Does this list have more than 50 items?" But this question makes an assumption - it assumes that the object it is given is a list. If I hand it a NULL, then that assumption is false. In that case, if the function returns either true or false, then it is breaking its own rules. The function cannot return anything and claim that it answered the question correctly. So it doesn't return - it throws an exception.

This is comparable to the "loaded question" logical fallacy. Every function asks a question. If the input it is given makes that question a fallacy, then throw an exception. This line is harder to draw with functions that return void, but the bottom line is: if the function's assumptions about its inputs are violated, it should throw an exception instead of returning normally.

The other side of this equation is: if you find your functions throwing exceptions frequently, then you probably need to refine their assumptions.

Answer 5

Exceptions are a somewhat costly effect, if for example you have a user that provides an invalid password, it is typically a better idea to pass back a failure flag, or some other indicator that it is invalid.

This is due to the way that exceptions are handled, true bad input, and unique critical stop items should be exceptions, but not failed login info.

Answer 6

Throwing exceptions causes the stack to unwind, which has some performance impacts (admitted, modern managed environments have improved on that). Still repeatedly throwing and catching exceptions in a nested situation would be a bad idea.

Probably more important than that, exceptions are meant for exceptional conditions. They should not be used for ordinary control flow, because this will hurt your code's readability.