Adding custom data to exception in C#

When debugging your code, Exceptions can be very useful. Exceptions can tell you a lot about what's happening when things go wrong. But sometimes we need more information about what's happening to be able to reproduce the error.

Take this code for an example:

public int ParseAge(string ageText)
{
    var parts = ageText.Split(' ');
    return int.Parse(parts[0]);
}

When trying to parse age from strings like "24 years old", this will work fine. But what happens if we input something that doesn't start with a number? We will then get a System.FormatException with the message 'Input string was not in a correct format.'.

What if you could add more data to that exception to help with debugging? You can!

The Exception class has a property called Data where you can add more information that relates to the Exception. You can do that by wrapping the code with a Try-Catch.

public static int ParseAge(string ageText)
{
    try
    {
        var parts = ageText.Split(' ');
        return int.Parse(parts[0]);
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        e.Data.Add("AgeText", ageText);
        throw;
    }
}

To then display the data you loop thru the dictionary like this:

foreach (DictionaryEntry pair in ex.Data)
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0} = {1}", pair.Key, pair.Value);
}

In a real application, this would of course be logged to a logging system like elasticsearch or seq.