How get the list of errors thrown by a function?

Question

With Swift now some functions are marked with throws, and this force the developers to call the function inside a do - try catch block. But how the developer can know the list of different exceptions thrown by that function?

As reference, here is a line of Java code:

static void  employeeAge(int age) throws MyExceptionA,MyExceptionB

Here is clear that the exceptions are 2 MyExceptionA and MyExceptionB and the developer can decide to act differently depends of the error.

Can we achieve the same on Swift?

Answer 1

When the Swift docs says a function throws, they mean that it throws an ErrorType (in Cocoa APIs usually an NSError), not an exception.

Consider the following do-try-catch flow for NSFileManager's createDirectoryAtPath:

let documentsPath = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(.DocumentDirectory, .UserDomainMask, true)[0]

do {
    try NSFileManager.defaultManager().createDirectoryAtPath(documentsPath, withIntermediateDirectories: false, attributes: nil)
} catch { 
    // 'error' variable automatically populated
    print(error)
    print(error.dynamicType)
}

createDirectoryAtPath will fail because the documents directory already exists. Logging the dynamicType of the error shows that it is in fact an NSError object:

Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=516 "The file “Documents” couldn’t be saved in the folder “35B0B3BF-D502-4BA0-A991-D07568AB87C6” because a file with the same name already exists." UserInfo={NSFilePath=/Users/jal/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/E8A35774-C9B7-42F0-93F1-8103FBBC7118/data/Containers/Data/Application/35B0B3BF-D502-4BA0-A991-D07568AB87C6/Documents, NSUnderlyingError=0x7fa88bd14410 {Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=17 "File exists"}}

NSError

In order to see the different types of errors a function can throw, you would have to examine the error for information to determine the type of error thrown, and how to handle each error. In the case of NSError this would be its domain, code, and description.

In this particular case, a directory already exists at that path, so the file manager cannot create a new directory. An example of another reason why this operation could fail would be if the file manager did not have write access. That would be error code 256.