Error Handling and Debugging

Errors, bugs, and therefore, debugging, are a part of life for a programmer. As the saying goes, if you haven't found any mistakes, then you aren't trying hard enough.

Dealing with errors actually involves two very different processes: error handling and debugging. Error handling is a combination of coding and methodology that allows your program to anticipate user and other errors. It allows you to create a robust program. Error handling does not involve weeding out bugs and glitches in your source code, although some of the error-handling techniques covered in this chapter can be used to great advantage at the debugging stage. In general, error handling should be part of your overall program plan, so that when you have an error-free script, nothing is going to bring it to a screeching halt. With some sturdy error handling in place, your program should be able to keep running despite all the misuse that your users can and certainly will throw at it.

The following ASP page illustrates some simple error handling:

Error Checking

The error handling in this example is the best kind it stops an error before it can occur. Suppose you hadn't used the conditional If...Else statement and had allowed any value to be assigned to x. Sooner or later, some user will fail to enter a value or will enter a zero. In the former case, it would generate a type mismatch error, while in the latter, it would generate divide by zero error. So error handling, as this code fragment illustrates, is as much about careful data validation as it is about handling actual errors.

While preventing an error before it can occur is one approach to handling errors, the second is to handle the error after it occurs. For example, the following code fragment is a "real" error handler that we'll examine later in this chapter, so don't worry about the syntax at this stage. Like the previous code fragment, it aims at handling the "cannot divide by zero" runtime errorin this case, only after it occurs:

Error Checking

As both of the previous examples show, the code itself is error-free and doesn't contain any bugs, but without either the data validation code or the error handling code, this program would be brought to its knees the first time a user enters a zero in the text box. Error handling therefore is a way to prevent a potentially disastrous error from halting program execution. Instead, if an error does occur, your program can inform the user in a much more user-friendly manner, and you can still retain control over the program.

Debugging , on the other hand, involves finding errors and removing them from your program. There are many types of errors that you can unwittingly build into your scripts, and finding them provides hours of fun for all the family. Errors can result from:

• Including language features or syntax that the scripting engine does not support within the script.
• Failing to correctly implement the intent of the program or some particular algorithm. This occurs when code produces behavior or results other than those you intend, although it is syntactically correct and does not generate any errors.
• Including components that contain bugs themselves. In this case, the problem lies with a particular component, rather than with your script, which "glues" the components together.

The single most important thing you need when debugging is patience: you have to think the problem through in a structured logical fashion in order to determine why you are experiencing a particular behavior. The one thing that you do have on your side is that programs will never do anything of their own free will (although they sometimes seem to). Let's begin by looking more closely at this structured, logical approach to debugging your scripts.