Handling Errors

Concert Technology provides two lines of defense for dealing with error conditions, suited for addressing two kind of errors. The first kind covers simple programming errors. Examples of this kind are: trying to use empty handle objects or passing arrays of incompatible lengths to functions.

This kind of error is usually an oversight and should not occur in a correct program. In order not to pay any runtime cost for correct programs asserting such conditions, the conditions are checked using assert() statements. The checking is disabled for production runs if compiled with the -DNDEBUG compiler option.

The second kind of error is more complex and cannot generally be avoided by correct programming. An example is memory exhaustion. The data may simply require too much memory, even when the program is correct. This kind of error is always checked at runtime. In cases where such an error occurs, Concert Technology throws a C++ exception.

In fact, Concert Technology provides a hierarchy of exception classes that all derive from the common base class IloException. Exceptions derived from this class are the only kind of exceptions that are thrown by Concert Technology. The exceptions thrown by IloCplex objects all derive from class IloAlgorithm::Exception or IloCplex::Exception.

To gracefully handle exceptions in a Concert Technology application we advise including all of the code in a try/catch clause:

IloEnv env;
try {
// ...
} catch (IloException& e) {
cerr << "Concert Exception: " << e << endl;
} catch (...) {
cerr <<  "Other Exception" << endl;
}
env.end();

The construction of the environment comes before the try/catch clause. In case of an exception, env.end() must still be called. To protect against failure during the construction of the environment, another try/catch clause may be added.

If code other than Concert Technology code is used in the part of the above example denoted by ..., we catch all other exceptions with the statement catch(...). Doing so is good practice, as it assures that no exception is unhandled.