how to improve exception handling in python/django

Question

This is an example of my exception handling in a django project:

def boxinfo(request, url: str):
    box = get_box(url)
    try:
        box.connect()
    except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as e:
        context = {'error_message': 'Could not connect to your box because the host is unknown.'}
        return render(request, 'box/error.html', context)
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
        context = {'error_message': 'Could not connect to your box because of an unknown error.'}
        return render(request, 'box/error.html', context)

• There is only two excepts now, but it should be more for the several request exceptions. But already the view method is bloated up by this. Is there a way to forward the except handling to a separate error method?
• There is also the problem, that I need here to call the render message for each except, I would like to avoid that.
• And here I also repeat for each except "could not connect to your box because", that should be set once when there appeared any exception.

I can solve it by something like this:

try:
    box.connect()
except Exception as e:
    return error_handling(request, e)

-

def error_handling(request, e):
    if type(e).__name__ == requests.exceptions.ConnectionError.__name__:
        context = {'error_message': 'Could not connect to your box because the host is unknown.'}
    elif type(e).__name__ == requests.exceptions.RequestException.__name__:
        context = {'error_message': 'Could not connect to your box because of an unknown error.'}
    else:
        context = {'error_message': 'There was an unkown error, sorry.'}
    return render(request, 'box/error.html', context)

and I could of course improve the error message thing then. But overall, is it a pythonic way to handle exceptions with if/else? For example I could not catch RequestException here if ConnectionError is thrown, so I would need to catch each requests error, that looks more like an ugly fiddling...

Answer 1

This is a use case for decorators. If it's something more general that applies to all views (say, error logging), you can use the Django exception middleware hook, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

With respect to the repetitive error string problem, the Pythonic way to solve it is to have a constant base string with {replaceable_parts} inserted, so that later on you can .format() them.

With this, say we have the following file decorators.py:

import functools

from django.shortcuts import render
from requests.exceptions import ConnectionError, RequestException


BASE_ERROR_MESSAGE = 'Could not connect to your box because {error_reason}'


def handle_view_exception(func):
    """Decorator for handling exceptions."""
    @functools.wraps(func)
    def wrapper(request, *args, **kwargs):
        try:
            response = func(request, *args, **kwargs)
        except RequestException as e:
            error_reason = 'of an unknown error.'
            if isinstance(e, ConnectionError):
                error_reason = 'the host is unknown.'
            context = {
              'error_message': BASE_ERROR_MESSAGE.format(error_reason=error_reason),
            }
            response = render(request, 'box/error.html', context)
        return response

    return wrapper

We're using the fact that ConnectionError is a subclass of RequestException in the requests library. We could also do a dictionary with the exception classes as keys, but the issue here is that this won't handle exception class inheritance, which is the kind of omission that generates subtle bugs later on. The isinstance function is a more reliable way of doing this check.

If your exception tree keeps growing, you can keep adding if statements. In case that starts to get unwieldy, I recommend looking here, but I'd say it's a code smell to have that much branching in error handling.

Then in your views:

from .decorators import handle_view_exception

@handle_view_exception
def boxinfo(request, url: str):
    box = get_box(url)
    box.connect()
    ...

That way the error handling logic is completely separate from your views, and best of all, it's reusable.