Has any one got any advice or resources for best practices for handling errors and exceptions from within a webservice.
ie.
How much information needs to be reported back to the client?
Should ALL errors bubble their way back as full blown exceptions?
Is it common/advisable to wrap responses within a class which contains any error information? (i've seen a lot of production level services take this approach)
Thanks guys.
I think it depends on what the clients are expected to be. If it was all internal to me and I was using WCF for everything, then I might opt for exceptions because they are handled automatically and quite easy to deal with.
If I thought I was going to have clients other than myself, especially non .NET clients, then I would go for something far simpler.
If you don't know, then assume that you'll have other clients, because this would be a pain to change, and it's not that bad for the .NET clients.
At a minimum, return some kind of error code and a description. If you aren't expected to handle multiple languages, they can use the description -- if they need another language, they can use the code for looking it up.