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Re: [ecf-dev] Exception propagation during file transfer

Hi Thomas,

Some comments below.

Thomas Hallgren wrote:
Hi Scott,
My use-case is perhaps a bit out of the ordinary. Here's what I want to do:

During a resolution/materialization from Buckminster, several jobs are spawned that are tasked with different types of downloads. It is common that the transitive resolution of one component results in parallel resolution of its dependencies. During the resolution there are junctions where things must come together so it's common to wait for a family of jobs to complete.

As you can see, my setup is not completely asynchronous. I need to know about completed downloads since the artifacts that are downloaded have an impact on how the resolution is progressing. One thing that has a big impact is of course if a download is failing. The failures are always propagated and will typically result in the failure of a node higher up in the resolution chain which in turns cancels not just the failing job, but also all parallel jobs extending from that same point.

So in essence, I need two things. I need to be able to catch exceptions during download and I need to be able to wait for a download to complete and then deal with the exception that caused the termination (if any). From the looks of it, this is partly implemented. An exception is indeed passed on when I receive the IIncomingFileTransferReceiveDoneEvent. But there's no way for me to set it (unless I throw a RuntimeException).

It's not totally clear to me how to wait for a completion. Ideally, if the FileTransferJob was accessible and if it did something intelligent and configurable with the Job.belongsTo(Object family) method, then it would be possible to assign a job family to it.

Yes, I think some kind of access to the FileTransferJob would be a good idea (to support your use case and possibly others).

That would make it very easy to wait for the completion of a set of parallel downloads.

Yes. Some thoughts on design/approach (please give ideas about how/how well this addresses your use case):

1) IFileTransfer could be enhanced with a method

Job IFileTransfer.getJob()

...so that after the event.receive(OutputStream) successfully completed, the IFileTransfer.getJob() would return a non-null Job instance. Clients could then call job.join()

2) API could be added (directly on or adapter for IRetrieveFileTransferContainerAdapter) to allow the Job instance to be constructed by clients...which would allow them to create a subclass of FileTransferJob that overrode the

boolean FileTransferJob.belongsTo(Object)

I think I would prefer 2, because it gives clients more control (i.e. they can create whatever Job instance type they prefer, before initiating file transfer).

So perhaps a method like this could be added to IRetrieveFileTransferContainerAdapter

public void setJobFactory(IRetrieveFileTransferJobFactory factory);

Where IRetrieveFileTransferJobFactory factory looked something like this:

public interface IRetrieveFileTransferJobFactory {

public FileTransferJob createFileTransferJob(IFileID fileID);

}

So how does this sound?

Scott


Regards,
Thomas Hallgren




Scott Lewis wrote:
Hi Thomas,

Thomas Hallgren wrote:
Hi,
I'm having some trouble understanding how to propagate exceptions during file transfer.

I have a IFileTransferListener implementation that listens to IIncomingFileTransferReceiveStartEvent. When encountered, it passes a File handle to my desired destination using the receive() method. This receive method in turn is declared with a throws IOException clause. My handleTransferEvent is not allowed to throw any exception at all.

Unless I want to handle the exception right there and then, my only option is to throw a RuntimeException. The exception can later be accessed from my IFileTransfer which is what I want, but why force the use of a RuntimeException?

The intention was to encourage/force the handling of the exception there (in handleTransferEvent). The main reason is that since the job is actually created by the file transfer instance, and handleTransferEvent is called by that job/thread, there really isn't anywhere else on the stack to propagate the exception *to*. Since there is no client controlled calling thread that is waiting on file transfer completion to handle the exception higher up the stack, the implementation of handleTransferEvent is the last place in the stack for the exception to be handled by the application.


I think that a more flexible approach would be to let the handleTransferEvent throw a CoreException and an IOException (since those two would cover most needs). An alternative would be to allow the InvocationTargetException but if that is used the IFileTransfer.getException() must be changed to return a Throwable.

I'm overstating the above paragraph a *little* bit. What I mean by this is that we *could* add throwing CoreException (and/or IOException) to the handleTransferEvent, and the job that calls this method (defined in AbstractRetrieveFileTransfer) could catch this exception, simply log it, and then return a status of IStatus.ERROR for the job created. But that wouldn't do too much good for user interface code...which wouldn't then have any chance to do anything in response such exceptions. That's really the reason why I wanted to force the handleTransferEvent implementer to handle any exceptions...rather than just passing it on assuming that someone else (ui code higher up the stack) would handle it...because in the asynchronous case there is not necessarily any other code to handle the exception higher up on the stack.

Thanks,

Scott


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