API Design: How should distinct classes of errors be handled from an asynchronous XMLHTTP call?

Question

I have a legacy VB6 application that needs to make asynchronous calls to a web service. The web service provides a search method allows end-users to query a central database and view the results from within the application. I'm using the MSXML2.XMLHTTP to make the requests, and have written a SearchWebService class that encapsulates the web service call and code to handle the response asychronously.

Currently, the SearchWebService raises one of two events to the caller: SearchCompleted and SearchFailed. A SearchCompleted event is raised that contains the search results in a parameter to the event if the call completes successfully. A SearchFailed is raised when any type of failure is detected, which can be anything from an improperly-formatted URL (this is possible because the URL is user-configurable), to low-level network errors such as "Host not found", to HTTP errors such as internal server errors. It returns a error message string to the end-user (which is extracted from the web service response body, if present, or from the HTTP status code text if the response has no body, or translated from the network error code if a network error occurs).

Because of various security requirements, the calling application does not access the web service directly, but instead accesses it through a proxy web server running at the customer site, which in turn accesses the actual web service through via a VPN. However, the SearchWebService doesn't know that the calling application is accessing the web service through a proxy: it's just given a URL and told to make the request. The existence of the proxy is a application-level requirement.

The problem is that from an end-user perspective, it's important that the calling application be able to distinguish between low-level network errors versus HTTP errors from the web service, and to distinguish proxy errors from remote web server errors. For example, the application needs to know if a request failed because the proxy server is down, or because the remote web service that the proxy is accessing is down. An application-specific message needs to be presented to the end-user in each case, such as "Search web service proxy server appears to be down. The proxy server may need to be restarted" versus "The proxy is currently running but the remote web server appears to be unavailable. Please contact (name of person in charge of the remote web server)." I could handle this directly in the SearchWebService class, but it seems wrong to generate these application-specific error messages from such a generic class (and the class might be used in environments that don't require a proxy, where the error messages would no longer make sense).

This distinction is important for troubleshooting: a proxy server problem can usually be resolved by the customer, but a remote web server error has to handled by a third party.

I was thinking one way to handle this would be to have the SearchWebService class detect different types of errors and raise different events in each case. For example, instead of a single SearchFailed event, I could have a NetworkError event for low-level network errors (which would indicate a problem accessing the proxy server), a ConfigurationError event for invalid properties on the SearchWebService class (such as passing an improperly-formatted URL), and a ServiceError for errors that occur on the remote web server (implying that the proxy is working properly but the remote server returned an error).

Now that I think about it, there is also an additional error scenario: it could be possible that the proxy server is running properly, but the remote web server is down, or the proxy server has been misconfigured.

Is the approach of using multiple error events to classify different classes of error a reasonable solution to this problem? For the last scenario (the proxy is running but the remote server cannot be reached), I'm guessing I may have to set up the proxy to return a specific HTTP error code so that client can detect this situation (i.e. something more specific than a 500 response).

Originally I kept the single SearchFailed event and simply added an additional errorCode parameter to the event, but that got messy quickly, especially in cases where there wasn't a logical error code to use (such as if the VB6 raises a "real" error, i.e. if the XMLHTTP class isn't registered).

Answer 1

I think that some ideas I've used with Java exceptions may apply here.

Having a large number of different Exceptions gets pretty messy, yet we need to give enough detail to the user so we don't want to lose information.

Hence I have a small number of specific Exceptions, which I guess would correspond to your Events:

• InvalidRequestEvent: Used when the user specifies bad information
• TransientErrorEvent: used when there's infrastructure issues when a retry might work.

I tend to work in environments where we have clusters of servers so if a user request hits a dying server then if he resubmits he'll probably get a good one, hence from his perspective a simple retry often works. However sometimes the error is with a service such as the Network or Database and in which case the user needs diagnostic information to report to the helpdesk. Hence we need to decide on the extra information to put into the exception. This is (if I understand you correctly) your question.

In the case of InvalidRequestException we would bet giving some information about the problems with the input. It could be on the lines of "Mismatched parenthese" or "Unknown column CUTSOMER in table ORDER". In the case of TransientErrorException it could be "Proxy server is down".

Now depending upon your exact requirments you may not actually choose to put that text in the Exception, but rather an error number which the presentation layer converts to a locale-specific string (English, French ...).

So either Exception might contain something like this (sorry for that Java syntax, but I hope the idea is clear):

BaseException {
    String ErrorText;     // the error text itself

    // OR if you want to allow for internationaliation

    int ErrorCode;        // my application specific code, corresponds to text held by the UI
    String[] params;      // specific parameters to be substitued in the error text
                          // CUTSOMER and ORDER in my example above


    int SystemErrorCode;    // If you have an underlying error code it goes here


    String SystemErrorText; // any further diagnoistic you might need to give to 
                            // the user so that they can report the problem to the 
                            // help desk.

    // OR instead of the text (this is something I've seen done)

    int SystemErrorTag;     // A unique id for this particular error problem. 
                            // This server systems will label their message in the
                            // server logs. Users just tell the help desk this number
                            // they don't need to read detailed server error text.

}