I’ve written an API which can be configured to signal errors in different ways (return values, debugging messages, or exceptions). I’ve got a check in place when the API is first initialized to see what type of error handling the client is requesting – what should I do when they request an undefined error handling type?
This is kind of similar to “Where do I log the error that I can’t write to the logfile?”
Do I go with the idiom of the language, do I fatal? Do I throw an exception, even though if they aren’t asking for exception handling they probably haven’t wrapped the call in a try/catch? The language I’m writing doesn’t have an ENUM type so it can’t be a type error.
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I see only a couple of choices:
- Assume the most common default and use it
- Crash (fatal error / configuration error)
- Walk through your different options until you find one that works (i.e., if the most common default is ‘write to file’ and you don’t have a file name, keep falling back to different options until you get to one you know works)
- Use all available options at the same time (i.e., throw a config error AND return and error code AND write to the console AND …)
Personally, I’d probably crash with a fatal configuration error, but your situation may be different.
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