I men­tioned at the Ephemeral Miniconf last month that as soon as I write about one Perl mod­ule (or five), some­one inevitably brings up anoth­er (or sev­en) I’ve missed. And of course, it hap­pened again last week: no soon­er had I writ­ten in pass­ing that I was using Exception::Class than the denizens of the Libera Chat IRC #perl chan­nel insist­ed I should use Throwable instead for defin­ing my excep­tions. (I’ve already blogged about var­i­ous ways of catch­ing excep­tions.)

Why Throwable? Aside from Exception::Class’s author rec­om­mend­ing it over his own work due to a ​“nicer, more mod­ern inter­face,” Throwable is a Moo role, so it’s com­pos­able into class­es along with oth­er roles instead of muck­ing about with mul­ti­ple inher­i­tance. This means that if your excep­tions need to do some­thing reusable in your appli­ca­tion like log­ging, you can also con­sume a role that does that and not have so much dupli­cate code. (No, I’m not going to pick a favorite log­ging mod­ule; I’ll prob­a­bly get that wrong too.)

However, since Throwable is a role instead of a class, I would have to define sev­er­al addi­tion­al packages in my tiny mod­uli­no script from last week, one for each excep­tion class I want. The beau­ty of Exception::Class is its sim­ple declar­a­tive nature: just use it and pass a list of desired class names along with options for attrib­ut­es and what­not. What’s need­ed for sim­ple use cas­es like mine is a declar­a­tive syn­tax for defin­ing sev­er­al excep­tion class­es with­out the noise of mul­ti­ple packages.

Enter Throwable::SugarFactory, a mod­ule that enables you to do just that by adding an exception func­tion for declar­ing excep­tion class­es. (There’s also the similarly-​named Throwable::Factory; see the above dis­cus­sion about nev­er being able to cov­er everybody’s favorites.) The exception func­tion takes three argu­ments: the name of the desired excep­tion class as a string, a descrip­tion, and an option­al list of instruc­tions Moo uses to build the class. It might look some­thing like this:

package Local::My::Exceptions;
use Throwable::SugarFactory;

exception GenericError  => 'something bad happened';
exception DetailedError => 'something specific happened' =>
  ( has => [ message => ( is => 'ro' ) ] );

1;

Throwable::SugarFactory takes care of cre­at­ing con­struc­tor func­tions in Perl-​style snake_case as well as func­tions for detect­ing what kind of excep­tion is being caught, so you can use your new excep­tion library like this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use experimental qw(isa);
use Feature::Compat::Try;
use JSON::MaybeXS;
use Local::My::Exceptions;

try {
    die generic_error();
}
catch ($e) {
    warn 'whoops!';
}

try {
    die detailed_error( message => 'you got me' );
}
catch ($e) {
    die encode_json( $e->to_hash )
      if $e isa DetailedError and defined $e->message;
    $e->throw if $e->does('Throwable');
    die $e;
}

The above also demon­strates a cou­ple of oth­er Throwable::SugarFactory fea­tures. First, you get a to_hash method that returns a hash ref­er­ence of all excep­tion data, suit­able for seri­al­iz­ing to JSON. Second, you get all of Throwable’s meth­ods, includ­ing throw for re-​throwing exceptions. 

So where does this leave last week’s FOAAS.com mod­uli­no client demon­stra­tion of object mock­ing tests? With a lit­tle bit of rewrit­ing to define and then use our sweet­er excep­tion library, it looks like this. You can review for a descrip­tion of the rest of its workings.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

package Local::CallFOAAS::Exceptions;
use Throwable::SugarFactory;

BEGIN {
    exception NoMethodError =>
      'no matching WebService::FOAAS method' =>
      ( has => [ method => ( is => 'ro' ) ] );
    exception ServiceError =>
      'error from WebService::FOAAS' =>
      ( has => [ message => ( is => 'ro' ) ] );
}

package Local::CallFOAAS;  # this is a modulino
use Test2::V0;             # enables strict, warnings, utf8

# declare all the new stuff we're using
use feature qw(say state);
use experimental qw(isa postderef signatures);
use Feature::Compat::Try;
use Syntax::Construct qw(non-destructive-substitution);

use WebService::FOAAS ();
use Package::Stash;
BEGIN { Local::CallFOAAS::Exceptions->import() }

my $foaas = Package::Stash->new('WebService::FOAAS');

my $run_as =
    !!$ENV{CPANTEST}       ? 'test'
  : !defined scalar caller ? 'run'
  :                          undef;
__PACKAGE__->$run_as(@ARGV) if defined $run_as;

sub run ( $class, @args ) {
    try { say $class->call_method(@args) }
    catch ($e) {
        die 'No method ', $e->method, "\n"
          if $e isa NoMethodError;
        die 'Service error: ', $e->message, "\n"
          if $e isa ServiceError;
        die "$e\n";
    }
    return;
}

# Utilities

sub methods ($) {
    state @methods = sort map s/^foaas_(.+)/$1/r,
      grep /^foaas_/, $foaas->list_all_symbols('CODE');
    return @methods;
}

sub call_method ( $class, $method = '', @args ) {
    state %methods = map { $_ => 1 } $class->methods();
    die no_method_error( method => $method )
      unless $methods{$method};
    return do {
        try { $foaas->get_symbol("&$method")->(@args) }
        catch ($e) { die service_error( message => $e ) }
    };
}

# Testing

sub test ( $class, @ ) {
    state $stash = Package::Stash->new($class);
    state @tests = sort grep /^_test_/,
      $stash->list_all_symbols('CODE');

    for my $test (@tests) {
        subtest $test => sub {
            try { $class->$test() }
            catch ($e) { diag $e }
        };
    }
    done_testing();
    return;
}

sub _test_can ($class) {
    state @subs = qw(run call_method methods test);
    can_ok $class, \@subs, "can do: @subs";
    return;
}

sub _test_methods ($class) {
    my $mock = mock 'WebService::FOAAS' => ( track => 1 );

    for my $method ( $class->methods() ) {
        $mock->override( $method => 1 );

        ok lives { $class->call_method($method) },
          "$method lives";
        ok scalar $mock->sub_tracking->{$method}->@*,
          "$method called";
    }
    return;
}

sub _test_service_failure ($class) {
    my $mock = mock 'WebService::FOAAS';

    for my $method ( $class->methods() ) {
        $mock->override( $method => sub { die 'mocked' } );

        my $exception =
          dies { $class->call_method($method) };
        isa_ok $exception, [ServiceError],
          "$method throws ServiceError on failure";
        like $exception->message, qr/^mocked/,
          "correct error in $method exception";
    }
    return;
}

1;

[Updated, thanks to Dan Book, Karen Etheridge, and Bob Kleemann] The only goofy bit above is the need to put the exception calls in a BEGIN block and then explic­it­ly call BEGIN { Local::CallFOAAS::Exceptions->import() }. Since the two pack­ages are in the same file, I can’t do a use state­ment since the implied require would look for a cor­re­spond­ing file or entry in %INC. (You can get around this by mess­ing with %INC direct­ly or through a mod­ule like me::inlined that does that mess­ing for you, but for a single-​purpose mod­uli­no like this it’s fine.)

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