Cleaner exception handling using rescue() helper in Laravel
If you want to make your web application robust, you get to handle those quirky and unpredictable exceptions. And the way you do that in PHP is by using try-catch blocks in your code. The same applies in the case of Laravel as well.
The traditional way
So, for instance, if you want to handle the exception when something goes wrong when saving/updating the model record, you can handle exceptions like so.
public function store(Request $request)
{
try
{
$comment = new BlogComment();
$comment->content = $request['comment'];
$comment->user_id = Auth::user()->id;
$comment->blog_id = $request['ticketId'];
$comment->save();
} catch(Exception $e) {
if (!($e instanceof SQLException)) {
app()->make(\App\Exceptions\Handler::class)->report($e);
// Report the exception if you don't know what actually caused it
}
request()->session()->flash('unsuccessMessage', 'Failed to add comment.');
return redirect()->back();
}
}
As you can tell, we’re using Laravel’s in-built error handling in the catch block to report the exception if it occurs.
Now, this is perfectly fine but do you know there’s a slicker and a cleaner way in Laravel that you can use to make this even shorter. Enter the rescue() helper.
The rescue() helper
Laravel provided this rescue() helper in which you can pass in the piece of code as a closure for which you want to handle exceptions. The helper will execute the given closure and catches any exceptions that occur during its execution. All exceptions that are caught will be sent to the exception handler.
So, if we want to rewrite the previous example using the rescue() helper, we can do it like so.
public function store(Request $request)
{
rescue(function () use ($request) {
$comment = new BlogComment();
$comment->content = $request['comment'];
$comment->user_id = Auth::user()->id;
$comment->blog_id = $request['ticketId'];
$comment->save();
}, function() {
request()->session()->flash('unsuccessMessage', 'Failed to add comment.');
return redirect()->back();
}, true);
}
As you can tell, the rescue() helper can accept three arguments.
- The first argument as I discussed is the closure that holds the code that you want exception handled.
- The second argument (optional) is the closure that will get run if an exception occurs or you can also pass in the default value here which will be returned when an exception occurs.
- The third argument (optional) accepts a
booleanvalue which will determine if you want to report the exception or not.- If it’s
true, therescue()helper will report the exception to the configured error handler. - If it’s
false, therescue()helper won’t report the exception.
- If it’s
Pretty neat, right?
If you’re curious, here’s how the function definition of rescue() helper looks like.
/**
* Catch a potential exception and return a default value.
*
* @param callable $callback
* @param mixed $rescue
* @param bool $report
* @return mixed
*/
function rescue(callable $callback, $rescue = null, $report = true)
{
try {
return $callback();
} catch (Throwable $e) {
if ($report) {
report($e);
}
return $rescue instanceof Closure ? $rescue($e) : $rescue;
}
}
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