Thread: Best way to report errors in class objects

I've been learning C++ the past couple of months, and I've found myself writing C in C++, as I come from years of writing C.

I am writing a class that uses a lot of windows API stuff, and it's divided into several functions, some of them private for internal use and some public for the user.
I have a dilemma, however. I'm not sure what would be the best way to report errors from inside my class. As you can imagine, there are a lot of different errors that can be reported, for a lot of the functions that get called inside my class's functions.
For some reason, I find that simply returning error values would be bad design, and I'd have to have a ........load of custom error values because in a lot of cases, several different APIs can return the same general error, which isn't good for debugging.

What would be the best way to report errors? Should I be using exceptions? I have never really used them in C++(I know how to use them from C# though).

I would really appreciate some advice from the resident C++ gurus.

I'm not a guru but I'd go with exceptions/error codes for library/production. For debug builds, LINE/FUNCTION macro and printf or assert or whichever. I'd never return errors.

Originally Posted by Dae

I'm not a guru but I'd go with exceptions/error codes for library/production. For debug builds, LINE/FUNCTION macro and printf or assert or whichever. I'd never return errors.

Thanks - I'll go with exceptions.

Chapter 62. Don't allow exceptions to propagate across module boundaries
Chapter 69. Establish a rational error handling policy, and follow it strictly
Chapter 70. Distinguish between errors and non-errors
Chapter 72. Prefer to use exceptions to report errors