does elmah handle caught exceptions as well

Question

I was wondering if something like elmah logged exceptions even when they do not bubble up to the application? I'd like to pop up a message when an exception occurs and still log the exception. Currently I've been putting everything in try catch blocks and spitting out messages, but this gets tedious.

Answer 1

You can always do something like:

try
{
    //something exceptional happens
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    MessageBox.Show(ex.ToString());
    throw;
}

That will allow you to process the exception and will still cause it to be thrown and handled by elmah.

Answer 2

If the exception is handled by something else, then Elmah will ignore it.

You could simply rethrow the exception if you need it logged by elmah.

Answer 3

ELMAH has been updated to support a new feature called Signaling.

This allows you to handle exceptions how you want, while still logging them to ELMAH.

try
{
    int i = 5;
    int j = 0;
    i = i / j; //Throws exception
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    MyPersonalHandlingCode(ex);
    ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(ex); //ELMAH Signaling
}

Re-throwing exceptions can be a bad practice as it makes it difficult to trace the flow of an application. Using Signaling is a much better approach if you intended to handle the error in some fashion and simply want to document it.

Please check out this excellent guide by DotNetSlackers on ELMAH