Erlang error handling philosophy - case vs throw

Question

I'm writing a REST service in Erlang and need to verify the received data before passing it to other internal functions for further processing; in order to do that, I'm currently using nested case expressions like this:

case all_args_defined(Args) of
    true ->
        ActionSuccess = action(Args),

        case ActionSuccess of
            {ok, _} -> ...;
            {fail, reason} -> {fail, reason}
        end,
    _ ->
        {fail, "args not defined"}
end,
...

I realize this is kind of ugly, but this way I can provide detailed error messages. Additionally, I don't think the usual make it crash philosophy is applicable here - I don't want my REST service to crash and be restarted every time somebody throws invalid arguments at it.

However, I'm considering abandoning all those cases in favor of an umbrella try/catch block catching any badmatch errors - would this work?

fun() ->
    true = all_args_defined(Args),
    {ok, _} = action(Args).

%% somewhere else
catch fun().

Answer 1

Since what you want to achieve is error reporting, you should structure the thing around the execution of actions and reporting of the result. Perhaps something like this:

  execute(Action, Args) ->
    try
      check_args(Args),
      Result = action(Action, Args),
      send_result(Result)
    catch
      throw:{fail, Reason} ->
        report_error(Reason);
      ExceptionClass:Term ->
        %% catch-all for all other unexpected exceptions
        Trace = erlang:get_stacktrace(),
        report_error({crash, ExceptionClass, Term, Trace})
    end.

  %% all of these throw {fail, Reason} if they detect something fishy
  %% and otherwise they return some value as result (or just crash)
  action(foo, [X1, X2]) -> ...;
  action(foo, Args) -> throw({fail, {bad_arity, foo, 2, Args}});
  action(...) -> ...

  %% this handles the formatting of all possible errors 
  report_error({bad_arity, Action, Arity, Args}) ->
    send_error(io_lib:format("wrong number of arguments for ~w: "
                             "expected ~w, but got ~w",
                             [Action, Arity, length(Args)]));
  report_error(...) -> ...;
  report_error({crash, Class, Term, Trace}) ->
    send_error(io_lib:format("internal error: "
                             "~w:~w~nstacktrace:~n~p~n",
                             [Class, Term, Trace])).