Should I catch all exceptions?

No. Only catch exceptions you can handle meaningfully. Catching and swallowing exceptions hides bugs. Use a global exception handler for unexpected errors and let it log the full context and return a 500 response.

How should API error responses be structured?

Use a consistent JSON format: { "error": { "code": "VALIDATION_ERROR", "message": "Email is required", "details": [...] } }. Include a machine-readable error code, a human-readable message, and optional field-level details for validation errors.

When should I retry a failed request?

Retry only transient errors (network timeouts, 502/503/504 responses). Never retry 4xx errors (client mistakes). Use exponential backoff with jitter to avoid thundering herd problems.

Error Handling Explained

Anticipating and managing failures gracefully — the practice that separates robust software from fragile software.

Error Handling

Error handling is the practice of anticipating, detecting, and responding to errors in software — from validation failures and network timeouts to unexpected exceptions. Good error handling ensures graceful degradation, useful feedback, and debuggable logs rather than silent failures or cryptic crashes.

Explanation

Errors in software are inevitable. Networks fail, users submit invalid input, databases run out of connections, third-party APIs go down. The question is not whether errors will occur but how the system responds when they do. Poor error handling — swallowing exceptions, returning generic "something went wrong" messages, or crashing entirely — makes debugging painful and erodes user trust. Effective error handling follows several principles: fail fast (detect errors as early as possible), fail loudly (log errors with sufficient context for debugging), fail gracefully (show users a helpful message and degrade functionality rather than crashing), and classify errors (distinguish between client errors the user can fix, server errors the team must fix, and transient errors that should be retried). In HTTP APIs, this maps to 4xx status codes for client errors and 5xx for server errors. Modern error handling also includes structured error responses (consistent JSON format with error code, message, and details), error boundaries in frontend frameworks (React error boundaries catch rendering failures), retry logic with exponential backoff for transient failures, and centralized error reporting (Sentry, Datadog) that aggregates errors across services and alerts the team when error rates spike.

Bookuvai Implementation

Bookuvai projects follow a standardized error handling architecture. APIs return structured error responses with error codes, human-readable messages, and field-level validation details. React frontends use error boundaries to prevent a single component failure from crashing the entire app. All errors are reported to Sentry with full stack traces, request context, and user identifiers. Our AI PM monitors error rates during milestone rollouts and automatically creates bug tickets when thresholds are exceeded.

Key Facts

Structured error responses with consistent formats are essential for API consumers
React error boundaries prevent component-level failures from crashing the entire application
Centralized error reporting (Sentry) reduces mean time to detection from hours to minutes

Related Terms

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I catch all exceptions?: No. Only catch exceptions you can handle meaningfully. Catching and swallowing exceptions hides bugs. Use a global exception handler for unexpected errors and let it log the full context and return a 500 response.
How should API error responses be structured?: Use a consistent JSON format: { "error": { "code": "VALIDATION_ERROR", "message": "Email is required", "details": [...] } }. Include a machine-readable error code, a human-readable message, and optional field-level details for validation errors.
When should I retry a failed request?: Retry only transient errors (network timeouts, 502/503/504 responses). Never retry 4xx errors (client mistakes). Use exponential backoff with jitter to avoid thundering herd problems.