Correct error handling in DAL

microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.adonet

9 Jan 2007 8:23 PM

BigStef

Hi people,
I've been struggling over the past weeks to get rid of my old VB6
habits of using error handling everywhere and I think I'm catching up
quite fast!
I have a question though... I have read many Best Practices topics
about error handling and I trie not to create derived Exception errors
to have Application specifics error since the framework covers a great
deal of possible exceptions that may occur.
So here is my question:
I have a DAL class library with a class that uses Enterprise Libraries
Data app blocks. In one of the methods I have defined in there, one is
executing a stored procedure that returns a list of rows which I store
in a dataset. Then, I want to check in the dataset if there are tables
in it, which would tell me that data have actually been returned. Now,
I have tried to have the SP return nothing which makes my DataSet
tables count to 1 but this table has 0 rows. What I want to do is, in
the case that no tables OR an empty table would be returned, I'd like
to throw an exception which would be handled in my client's try catch
but I do not want to use this: throw new Exception(...) since using
Exception, ApplicationException or Systemexception is not
recommended... What would be the best way to handle this situation?
Maybe I am complicating myself?
All I want is to raise some kind of notification without having to have
if statements that checks for a flag old vb6-style.
If my question isn't quite clear, feel free to ask for more precisions!

Thanks a lot in advance!

Regards,

BigStef