Repeating a function in C# until it no longer throws an exception

Question

I've got a class that calls a SOAP interface, and gets an array of data back. However, if this request times out, it throws an exception. This is good. However, I want my program to attempt to make this call again. If it times out, I'd like it to keep making this call until it succeeds. How can I accomplish this?

For example:

try
{
   salesOrdersArray = MagServ.salesOrderList(sessID, filter);
}
catch
{
   ?? What Goes Here to FORCE the above line of code to rerun until it succeeds.
}

Answer 1

You just need to loop forever:

while (true)
{
    try
    {
        salesOrdersArray = MagServ.salesOrderList(sessID, filter);
        break; // Exit the loop. Could return from the method, depending
               // on what it does...
    }
    catch
    {
        // Log, I suspect...
    }
}

Note that you should almost certainly not actually loop forever. You should almost certainly have a maximum number of attempts, and probably only catch specific exceptions. Catching all exceptions forever could be appalling... imagine if salesOrderList (unconventional method name, btw) throws ArgumentNullException because you've got a bug and filter is null... do you really want to tie up 100% of your CPU forever?