MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How Do I? Fail silently when no articles to DL

tBunnyMan · 05-09-2012, 02:59 PM

Is there any hack or other way to cleanly fail if there is no articles to download?

I understand that a completely silent failure is bad since the user can't tell why they didn't get their book but it's troublesome to have to check all the exceptions when no book generated is expected from time to time.
False Negatives desensitize the user.

Ex.
The Pocket plugin: The articles can be depleted by the user and if they don't refill it before the next scheduled download they get thrown exceptions, not clean errors. Currently I raise the exception but logging the problem and returning an empty list makes Calibre error out just as hard.

05-09-2012, 02:59 PM	#1
tBunnyMan Enthusiast Posts: 39 Karma: 10 Join Date: Feb 2012 Location: Las Vegas, NV Device: nook Simple GlowLight	How Do I? Fail silently when no articles to DL Is there any hack or other way to cleanly fail if there is no articles to download? I understand that a completely silent failure is bad since the user can't tell why they didn't get their book but it's troublesome to have to check all the exceptions when no book generated is expected from time to time. False Negatives desensitize the user. Ex. The Pocket plugin: The articles can be depleted by the user and if they don't refill it before the next scheduled download they get thrown exceptions, not clean errors. Currently I raise the exception but logging the problem and returning an empty list makes Calibre error out just as hard.