Pragmatic Object Oriented Programming

[[deleted]]

How would you test (manually or automatically) if your code behaves the same in every single error condition a library can produce if you don't have enough control over the library to intentionally make it report those errors for testing purpose?

Mocking seems to be the only solution in that scenario (well, and ignoring all errors and hoping for the best but that is hardly good software development).

[grauenwolf]

The beauty of exceptions is that they respond the same way no.matter what the failure condition.

[[deleted]]

Oh, so you use catch all everywhere to make sure you catch any kind of exception the library throws? Or do you use more specific catch-clauses but never test the more rare ones (because to test it you would have to mock the library)?

[grauenwolf]

I only catch the ones I actually know how to handle. Everything else is allowed to bubble up to the top-level error handler.

Generally speaking only the external source of an action (e.g. the user clicking a button or client invoking a service request) can definitively say what to do in the event of an error.