What are some implementations of Exception filtering in the Circuit Breaker pattern?

Question

The Circuit Breaker pattern, from the book Release It!, protects a remote service from requests while it is failing (or recovering) and helps the client manage repeated remote service failure. I like Davy Brion’s stateful circuit breaker and Ayende’s lazy timeout fix is very clean.

However, I have not seen a lot of implementations of filtering which exceptions will cause an increase in the failure count of a circuit breaker.

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Don't worry about showing locking, unless your implementation is particularly dependent on clever locking. FYI, Phil Haack appears to have the latest version of TimedLock, used in Davy Brion's articles.

Answer 1

Filter which Types will increase the count

Your first thought may be to construct a generic method call with a generic try... catch block. However, the below will not work due to a .NET bug, please see these questions for more information.

public void AttemptCall<TException>(Action action)
    where TException : Exception
{
    try
    {
        action();
    }
    catch(TException e)
    {
         state.ActUponExcpetion(e);
         throw;
    }
}

You need to catch all exceptions and investigate the type.

public void AttemptCall<TException>(Action action)
    where TException : Exception
{
    try
    {
        action();
    }
    catch(TException e)
    {
         if(e is TException)
             state.ActUponExcpetion(e);

         throw;
    }
}

Answer 2

Filter which Types will not increase the count

Tim Ross wrote about this.

private readonly List<Exception> ignored = new List<Exception>();

public void Ignore<TException>() 
    where TException : Exception
{
    Type type = typeof(TException);
    if(ignored.Contains(type))
        return;

    ignored.Add(type);
}

public void AttemptCall(Action action)
{
     try
     {
         action();
     }
     catch(Exception e)
     {
         if(!ignore.Contains(e.GetType()))
             state.ActUponException(e);

         throw;
     }
}

Answer 3

Filter by Predicate

A predicate can provide extended criteria and filtering logic.

public void AttemptCall(Action action, Predicate<Exception> match)
{
    try
    {
        action();
    }
    catch(Exception e)
    {
        if(match(e))
            state.ActUponException(e);

        throw;
    }
}

For example, you may want to increase the circuit breaker only on a WebException caused by a timeout.

circuitBreaker.AttemptCall(() => service.DoWork(), e =>
    {
        WebException local = e as WebException;
        if(local == null)
            return false;

        return local.Status == WebExceptionStatus.Timeout;
    });