dataservices-api/docs/internal/exception_safe.md

Exception-Safe functions

The public API dataservices functions emit exceptions in general when an error occurs or a limiting condition is met (e.g. quotas are exceeded).

For each public function func we have a internal function named _func_exception_safe which acts as a wrapper to the public function, with the same signature, but captures exceptions generated during its execution (except those due to incomplete configuration or authentication issues) and returns NULL or empty set values in those cases.

Please note these functions are considered not public and therefore their API (including which exceptions are wrapped and which ones are not) may change.

Instead of raising an exception they raise warnings, hopefully containing the same information of the original exception.

Intended Use

These functions are useful in cases when it is undesirable to rollback a transaction. Fo example if a table is geocoded with:

UPDATE table SET the_geom=cdb_geocode_street_point(address,city,NULL,country);

In case of the user geocoding quota being exhausted mid-process, the user could incur in external service expenses but any geocoded data would be lost due to the transaction rollback.

We can avoid the problem using the corresponding exception-safe function:

UPDATE table SET the_geom=_cdb_geocode_street_point_exception_safe(address,city,NULL,country);

Addition Information

See https://github.com/CartoDB/dataservices-api/issues/314 for more information.