A Systematic Approach for Structuring Exception Handling in Robust Component-Based Software
This article addresses the systematic incorporation of exception handling into component-based systems. By "component-based", one can infer "object-oriented" since the use of libraries of classes, such ast STL and JCL, can be seen as the use of components, building blocks, while constructing large-scale software systems. Read this article in its entirety to get a sense of how to put exception handling to good use.
5. Case Study
5.3 Design of the Exceptional Behaviour
The UML Components process suggests that, for each step in the main scenario of a use case, an operation in a system layer interface should be defined. We performed this activity during the first iteration of the case study. In the second iteration, the operations were specified in terms of pre- and post-conditions, and the exceptions they might signal.
For instance, step 4 of Register Complaint use case was mapped to the listRoadSections operation of the IComplaintRegistration interface (Figure 8). The specification of this operation, as well as the exceptions that it may signal, are described in Figure 11.
After specifying the exceptional failure hypotheses for all the exceptional scenarios, we defined the exceptional behaviour of the system for each of them. For the listRoadSections operation, the exceptional behaviour consists of preparing an error message and displaying it to the user. In fact, this exceptional behaviour is adopted by almost all the operations in the system. In some cases, rollback is also performed, in order to guarantee the consistence of the system's state.