Tinyerror

Easy custom errors in browsers, Node, and Applitude

Status: DEPRECATED - Errors in ES6 can now be subclassed to achieve similar behavior.

Here's a simple example:

var e = error('Error Name', 'Error message');

Once you have your custom error object, you can do whatever you like with it. Suggestions:

• Pass it into a promise rejection
• Pass it into an error callback
• Log it
• Throw it (use with caution, don't throw in asynchronous code)

That's not all it can do, of course. Here's the full call signature:

var e = error(name, message, code, proto);

The code parameter lets you assign an error code to an error, and store it for later reference on the error.errors object.

var e = error('Not Found', 'Where did you last see it?', '404');

You can get errors by code by calling the error.code() method:

var e = error.code('404'); // Get the cached 404 error.

Error codes can be any valid string, as long as they're unique. This snippet will retrieve a cached error with the code, "my custom error code".

var e = error.code('my custom error code');

If you define an error code that already exists, the most recent definition wins (the existing one gets overridden).

The proto parameter lets you pass in a custom error prototype. For example, to inherit from TypeError:

var e = error('TypeError', 'Expected type: string',
  'TypeError.StringExpected', new TypeError());

A globally shared pool of standard errors is great, but what if you have domain-specific errors you want to limit to your own module? No problem, just create a new instance of the error object. For example, a media player might need some playback errors:

var mediaError = error.createInstance(),
  e = mediaError('PlayError', 'Can\'t play media file.', 'PlayError');

Tips

• Don't throw from async functions. Instead, reject a promise with it, or pass it into a callback. Note that none of these methods will throw an error for you automatically, so they're safe to use anywhere.

• Too many error types is just as bad as too few. Keep it in check.

• You can store and pre-load application-level custom error types from json. Just set or extend the error.errors object after you load the error library.

Credit

• Eric Elliott, author of "Programming JavaScript Applications" (O'Reilly)
• Tout.com