Handling Exceptions

   

As we've said repeatedly throughout this chapter, don't count on your data maintenance policies to cover 100 percent of the situations you encounter. Exceptions are a fact of life. You would do well to formulate policies and procedures that minimize the need for exception handling, but you should also prepare to handle the inevitable exceptions.

Exceptions take many forms. One form of exception involves simple errors. For example, you might count on data from one of your sources to be formatted in a particular way. If it is not, your data update procedure should handle this situation gracefully. Logging errors is always a good practice, as is correcting errors when possible. Aborting the entire update process because of a single error in the data is usually a bad idea, although there are exceptions even to this advice, of course. If the error is in mission-critical data that cannot tolerate any errors, aborting the update process may indeed be the best approach. Evaluate your situation to determine which course of action is most appropriate.

Another form of exception involves the policy itself. These kinds of exceptions are usually caused by user needs. For example, your policy might state that telephone and office address information for all employees is to be published to the outside world. Some of your employees might not want this information published for reasons of privacy and security (perhaps they've been the victims of stalking, for example). You could handle this exception by placing access control on the user's entry or by simply not updating the user's phone and address information from the data source. Be prepared to respond to legitimate exceptions like this.

   


Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services
Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672323168
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 242

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