Overloading best practice

Question

I have two static methods that I want to use for error handling. One of which passes the exception object and the other is just used if needing to report an error which would be a text based message (string errorMessage).

The code within the two methods is pretty much the same with the exception of how the message is build up and sent to a log file. How can I refactor this so that I'm not duplicating code?

public static void ReportError(Exception exceptionRaised, string reference, string customMessage, bool sendEmail)
{
    // get filename
    // check if logfile exists, blah, blah
    // build up message from exception, reference & custom message using string builder
    // save message
    // email error (if set)
}

public static void ReportError(string errorMessage, string reference, bool sendEmail)
{
    // get filename
    // check if logfile exists, blah, blah
    // build up message from errorMessage & reference string builder
    // save message
    // email error (if set)
}

Thanks.

Answer 1

Seeing as all you're doing differently is building up a custom message in the first method, change your first method to pass the custom exception through the plain text error message method instead:

public static void ReportError(Exception exceptionRaised, string reference, 
    string customMessage, bool sendEmail)
{
    string errorMessage = BuildMessage(exceptionRaised, customMessage);
    ReportError(errorMessage, reference, sendEmail);
}

Disclaimer: Not entirely sure if this will work. It depends how you build up the error message.

EDIT:

Or you could add a third overload:

private static void ReportError(string completeException, bool sendEmail)
{
     // Do what needs to be done.
}

And then your methods could just both build up the exception message and pass that string and sendEmail boolean to the third overload.