Re: Errors vs. exceptions

Erik,

Is it an option to ‘not rename’ the events if the xforms version is specified and set to an older version? This tackles the backwards compatibility issue a bit.

Regards,

Nick

From: <ebruchez@gmail.com> on behalf of Erik Bruchez <ebruchez@orbeon.com>
Date: Wednesday 7 September 2016 at 07:35
To: "public-xformsusers@w3.org" <public-xformsusers@w3.org>
Subject: Errors vs. exceptions
Resent-From: <public-xformsusers@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Wednesday 7 September 2016 at 07:36

All,

I have a task of figuring out whether we need to rename some/all -error events to -exception events (or the other way around ;).

In XForms 1.1, we had non-fatal -exception events, and fatal (stopping processing without any way of recovering) -error events (the opposite of Java!).

In XForms 2, we no longer have events which are necessarily fatal: all previously-fatal events can be canceled (that is, we can cancel the default action which is to stop processing) and are renamed into -error.

This would seem to call for calling them -error, following the XForms 1.1 convention, and also following xforms-submit-error and xforms-output-error which never were fatal. Also, "error" is shorter than "exception", which is nice.

Then there is the question of backward-compatibility. One rationale for just creating new -error events and removing the old -exception events is that there was no way to really do much with -exception events as they would stop processing soon after being dispatched. So I think that backward-compatibility is not a big issue here. We *could* consider keeping -exception events alongside the new -error events, but that probably wouldn't bring much benefit.

So I think the naming -error is acceptable.

One question coming to mind is whether we should consider never halting processing, that is making recovering from errors the default, instead of requiring the form author to catch all those events.

-Erik