On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Steve Crawford wrote: > One thing that would be great from a user's perspective (and which might > reduce the volume of support questions as well) is to uniquely number all > errors as in: > Error 1036: the foo could not faz the fleep >
I agree with the unique codes. It does make googling for help easier. This is how informix does it - you get a sqlstate and what they call a 'native error'. Using SQLError (odbc) you can get a one liner about it, but the real meat comes from either the documentation or from the command line program "finderr". You give it the native error and it gives you a paragraph of information about the problem and what options you have. Plus, if you have a numeric code sent back you can have an error handler that looks quite a bit nicer - switch(pgErrorCode) { case PG_HDD_ON_FIRE: die_horrifically(); break; case PG_UNKNOWN_USER: tell_user_he_is_dumb(); break; } instead of a big pile of strcmp's. >From an efficiency standpoint, I don't know if it would have any benefit of sending back a native code and have the client ask for the details if it wants it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jeff Trout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.jefftrout.com/ Ronald McDonald, with the help of cheese soup, controls America from a secret volkswagon hidden in the past ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])