CRUD operations; do you notify whether the insert,update etc. went well?

Question

I have a simple question for you (i hope) :)

I have pretty much always used void as a "return" type when doing CRUD operations on data.

Eg. Consider this code:

public void Insert(IAuctionItem item) {
    if (item == null) {
        AuctionLogger.LogException(new ArgumentNullException("item is null"));
    }

    _dataStore.DataContext.AuctionItems.InsertOnSubmit((AuctionItem)item);
    _dataStore.DataContext.SubmitChanges();
}

and then considen this code:

public bool Insert(IAuctionItem item) {
    if (item == null) {
        AuctionLogger.LogException(new ArgumentNullException("item is null"));
    }

    _dataStore.DataContext.AuctionItems.InsertOnSubmit((AuctionItem)item);
    _dataStore.DataContext.SubmitChanges();

    return true;
}

It actually just comes down to whether you should notify that something was inserted (and went well) or not ?

Answer 1

I typically go with the first option there.

Given your code, if something goes wrong with the insert there will be an Exception thrown.

Since you have no try/catch block around the Data Access code, the calling code will have to handle that Exception...thus it will know both if and why it failed. If you just returned true/false, the calling code will have no idea why there was a failure (it may or may not care).

Answer 2

I think it would make more sense if in the case where "item == null" that you returned "false". That would indicate that it was a case that you expect to happen not infrequently, and that therefore you don't want it to raise an exception but the calling code could handle the "false" return value.

As it standards, you'll return "true" or there'll be an exception - that doesn't really help you much.