Question

What is Exception Handling in WCF? What are the ways for WCF Exception Handling?

Answer 1

Exception handling is critical to all applications for troubleshooting the unexpected problems in applications. The Windows Communication Framework (WCF) provides several options for handling exceptions in WCF services. This article discusses these approaches and describes the advantages and disadvantages of each. The following options are provided to handle exceptions in WCF:

1. Using returnUnknownExceptionsAsFaults: Debugging Mode
2. Using FaultException: Best Option.
3. Using IErrorHandler: Only when the exception can't be handled by Fault

Exception handling in WCF



Exceptions inside a WCF Service

Before describing the details of exception handling in WCF, let's explore what happens if we do not handle an exception inside the service. Consider a service with the CreateUser method as shown in the following:

1. public void CreateUser(User user)  
2. {  
3.     if(user.isValid())  
4.     {  
5.         //Create User   
6.     }  
7.     else  
8.     {  
9.         throw new ApplicationException(“User Inavalid.”);  
10.     }  
11. }  

Example

1. public class DBManagerService: IDBManagerService  
2.   
3. void Save(Employee emp)  
4. {  
5.     try  
6.     {  
7.         //Code to store an employee object to the database  
8.     }  
9.     catch (Exception ex  
10.         {  
11.             throw new Exception(“Error occurred  
12.                 while saving data…”);  
13.         }  
14.     }  
15. }