Exception Handlers

Exception handlers are only supported for BER decoding. BER is more amenable to error recovery than some other encoding rules.

To implement an exception handler, you do two things:

The following example is taken from the reader program of the csharp/sample_ber/ErrorHandlersample. In that sample, we illustrate ignoring all of the exceptions that can be ignored. You can see that some exceptions requuire skipping a TLV (tag-length-value), while others don't require any special action. The runtime documentation for Asn1BerExceptionHandler documents what is required to handle each type of exception. Exceptions that are not ignored are simply returned by the handler; if we had wanted to, the handler could have constructed some other exception and returned that, instead.

   public class Handler : Asn1BerExceptionHandler
   {
      public System.Exception HandleException(Asn1Exception e, 
                                       Asn1BerDecodeBuffer buffer)
      {
         try {
            if (e is Asn1MissingRequiredException ||
               e is Asn1InvalidEnumException) 
            {
               //ignore exception; no recovery action required
               System.Console.Out.WriteLine("IGNORED: " + e.Message);
               return null;
            }
            else if (e is Asn1SeqOrderException ||
                     e is Asn1UnexpectedElementException ||
                     e is Asn1SetDuplicateException ||
                     e is Asn1NotInSetException ||
                     e is Asn1InvalidChoiceOptionException) 
            {
               //skip the offending element
               buffer.SkipTLV();
               System.Console.Out.WriteLine("IGNORED: " + e.Message);
               return null;
            }
         }
         catch (System.Exception) {
            //ignore: recovery failed
         }
         
         return e;
      }                                    
   }
   

Setting the exception handler is simple:

            // Create a decode buffer object
            Asn1BerDecodeBuffer decodeBuffer = 
               new Asn1BerDecodeBuffer (ins);
               
            decodeBuffer.SetExceptionHandler(new Handler());