Part 2a: (Slightly) More Elegant Error Handling in Business Central

One of the underrated advantages to doing a little blogging is that you can write about a subject you know a little about and have people who actually know what they are talking about reply to tell you a better way to do it.

There’s probably a minimum threshold of credibility on the subject you need in order for people to post serious replies. If I posted some nonsense about my keyhole surgery technique I doubt I’d get helpful corrections from the Royal College of Surgeons. It would also represent something of a departure from my usual DevOps, Git, testing and BC development posts.

Anyway, I had some useful comments on my previous post about error handling – thanks.

Use the Error Message Table

Henrik Helgesen pointed out you can skip all the codeunits, activation, context, finishing… and just use the Error Message table directly. It has some a bunch of LogXYZ methods for recording errors or messages.

It has a method to determine if there are error messages to show and a method to show them. Nice and simple and, for the scenario that I outlined, probably more appropriate.

LogTestField()

In the last post I complained about the lack of TestField functionality in the Error Message Mgt. codeunit. Kilian replied to say that the method exists in BC17. I doubt that has anything to do with my post – but I’m happy to take some credit if required. It has the signature that you’d expect.

procedure LogTestField(SourceVariant: Variant; SourceFieldNo: Integer) IsLogged: Boolean

That makes the error handling code far less verbose and, crucially, we don’t have to provide a label or any translations for the error message – that’s handled by the framework.

Consistent Behaviour With Base App

How useful is it for partners to invest in this sort of error handling if the base app doesn’t use it? A consistent user experience might still be better than improving our error handling but departing from standard paradigms in the process. Fair point.

Although actually, it looks like more of this is coming to the base app. This is a snip of the results when searching for “LogTestField” in the base app in BC 17.1.17104.0-W1.

49 results in 2 files. OK, so probably still a long way to go to make this the default user experience but its a start. I’m hopeful that this is an area that Microsoft will pay some attention to over the next few versions, improve the framework and make it easier for us to follow their lead.