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(I am actually using Ektron CMS, and am using Widgets, which are a very simple extension of a user control).

Problem: I have a web page that contains many widgets. If an exception occurs in one of these widgets, the page stops and the user is given a server error. I would like to have unhandled exceptions in a widget to log the exception, stop display of that widget and allow the page to continue.

E.g. You have a weather widget on each page that gets data via a web service. If the web service sends you malformed XML, you would like the site to still be available.

Potential solutions:
Plan A) Within each widget, wrap contents of the init or display function in a Try-Catch statement.
Plan B) Create a new IRobustWidget interface which extends IWidget, and do the Try-Catch in there.

Both of these options seem a little "dirty" to me, as I've read that generic catch (exception) statements are a bit of an anti-pattern. I'm leaning towards Plan B, as this seems more modular.

  • Have I missed any other options?
  • Is a generic Try-Catch ok in this regard?


(I've also logged this at the Ektron forums)

Spongeboy
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2 Answers2

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The fact that you are loading the data via a web-service makes me wonder whether you should perhaps load this data async, via either an ajax-loaded <div>, or an <iframe>; i.e. the widget(s) is(/are) downloaded in separate requests. This gets you two advantages:

  • the core page is not delayed at all by obtaining the data - that should load briefly after the main page does
  • if the panel fails to load.... meh (assuming it is nice-to-have-but-not-critical)

The disadvantage is an additional round-trip, but by comparison to everything else happening, this doesn't necessarily pose a problem.

Marc Gravell
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  • Thanks, I hadn't considered that. This fits in with my decision to make the controls themselves more responsible for their error handling. I'm moving away from trying to allow the page to render "no matter what", as it appears to be too much effort at this stage in our project. – Spongeboy Nov 03 '10 at 00:36
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I've found what I was after- Catching unhandled exceptions in ASP.NET UserControls

I also realise that I need to decide which event I need to focus on (Render, Load or a custom SetDisplay function)

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Spongeboy
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