Error Handling in Classes

Anon

I have written some custom classess for my PHP+MySQL application, and I was wondering how I can implement a robust error-handling system inside my classes.

I want to be able to return error codes and messages back to callers in my PHP scripts. Ultimately, I want to be able to output appropriate error messages from my class methods back out to the user's browser.

Am I wrong to attempt to do most input validation inside my classes, or should I validate the data from HTML forms and other inputs before I call my custom methods?

I'm thinking of making most error messages define()s so that I can change them at the top of my class files and also refer to them as defined variables like "PRODMINLEN" might output "The Product Name you entered was not at least 4 characters", if I'm doing a check like strlen($product_name) < 4 in my class.

FYI, I'm using PHP4+MySQL with PHPLib Authentication and Templates. I am using PHPLib's database abstraction within my classes as well.

Any ideas on how to design an error handling mechanism inside my classes would be appreciated... thanks!

omegatron

van__

Howdie neighbor (check my host listing up top)

Well... do what I did and write an object to handle it. Also, defining the error messages is not a good idea, since you'll generate warnings by trying to redefine a constant (in the case of more than 1 error)

Here's a function that may be a guiding light:

function SEND_ERROR_REPORT() {
/*

Method is called on error
will generate email to admin

if (is_array($GLOBALS['ERROR_LOG'])) {

// populate the email...
$Email_Body = SHOW_DOMAIN . " generated an error on " .
strftime('%c',time()) . "\n";

$Email_Body = "Page: " . PAGE_URI;

foreach ($GLOBALS['ERROR_LOG'] as $LOCAL=>$ERROR) {
$Email_Body .= "The " . $LOCAL . " error message was: " . $ERROR . "\n\n";
}

mail(ADMIN_EMAIL, 'Error Report', $Email_Body, 'From: ' . SHOW_DOMAIN .
'<'.ADMIN_EMAIL.'>' );
}

return;
}

...anyway, I'm looking for some decent OOP developers for some PHP projects and you're in the hood, so send me an email if you got some contracting time.