Best practice for error handling in codeigniter / php apps

Question

Hi everyone,

We're working with a new codeigniter based application that are cross referencing different PHP functions forwards and backwards from various libraries, models and such.

We're running PHP5 on the server and we try to find a good way for managing errors and status reports that arises from the usage of our functions. While using return in functions, the execution is ended, so nothing more can be sent back. Right?

What's the best practice to send a status information or error code upon ending execution of actual function?

Should we look into using exceptions or any other approach? http://us.php.net/manual/en/language.exceptions.php

Answer 1

Should we look into using exceptions or any other approach?

Since you are committed to PHP5 I think using exceptions in your custom libraries is a great idea. The use of Try/Catch and Exceptions are going to provide a lot better control of your code as well as potentially more robust error logging.

Extending the Exceptions class is going to allow you to have a granular level of control over what kind of exceptions your models and libraries can throw and how you get to react to them.

I can imagine having a model throw an dataInputException if it was provided bad input, and a dataOperationException if it failed to operate on the data (say $this->db->insert() returned a failure). How you handle each kind of exception might be different.

In terms of error reporting for development, the Exceptions class methods are going to provide you a lot of information (like the file name and line number).

Also, some third-party code makes use of Exceptions (such as Facebook Connect's PHP Lib).