Strategy for database exceptions

Question

I am designing our strategy for handling database exceptions which may occur upon saving for instance.
For example, if a user tries to save an object which violates a unique key constraint, I get that error wrapped by the DatabaseException class as documented.
The wrinkle is that I would really like to report to the user which fields caused this violation. We are using an oracle database for the foreseeable future, so portability is not critical.
Has anyone designed something which can get this metadata and attach it to the exception? Any tips would be much appreciated.
Cheers,
craig

Answer 1

I have found it very helpfull to separate the database / recordset from the rest of the project. If you create objects that model your records then the rest of your program doesn't know or care where the data came from. You could easily write store / retrieve methods to deal with the data from a file, over the web, from a socket connection, etc without having to alter your entire app. My advise is to do as little manipulation on the resultsets and focus on object manipulation instead. Mind you if your writing some sort of generic recordset "explorer" then this doesn't apply. You can't possibly model objects from some random recordset that you have no previous knowledge of. In that case you'd have to examine the meta data of the recordset to get field names, data types, etc.