WCF Service Not Available - Power Outage - What Error

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Hi All,

I have a really simple WCF service that is consumed by a web page. I'm using an object datasource to populate a listview. I have no code in the code-behind. It was all done with the wizards. This weekend, due to a power outage caused by a flood, the server where the service resides was down. The webpage, hosted offsite, would not load because the service was down. Today, I'm trying to add error handling that will still let the page load and just not populate the listview. This has been more difficult that I thought it would be. Where/How should I catch the exception? All I did was add a service reference and then use wizards for the object datasource and listview. I still want the webpage to load and don't want to go over to a custom error page. This seems like it should be easy. Am I missing something obvious? It's an ASP.NET 3.5 website.

Thanks,
Chuck

Posted 12-Sep-11 8:21am

GChuck

Updated 12-Sep-11 8:51am

v2

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2 solutions

Solution 1

The exception should be handled at the client side from where the service call is initiated. Here is something similar discussed:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2816901/handling-service-unavailable-errors-in-asp-net[^]

Posted 12-Sep-11 10:39am

Pradeep Shukla

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GChuck · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-13T04:52:00

Thanks for the idea. After reading and researching, I decided to get rid of the object datasource and bind the listview programatically. The service returns a list so I'm checking the list count and if it's > 0 I'm setting the datasource to the list and then binding it. If the service is down, I hide the listview. If the service is down the error will be caught in the first section of the code. I'm still surprised the whole page blew up when the service was down and there isn't a setting to handle it, but this was easy enough. Here is the code (it's the only code in the code-behind):

<pre lang="vb"> Protected Sub lvCurrentTopics_Load(sender As Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles lvCurrentTopics.Load
Try

' the service returns a list of objects
Dim lst As New Generic.List(Of srbcweb_wcf.CurrentTopic)

' open the client and populated the list
Using c As New srbcweb_wcf.SRBCWeb_wcfClient

c.Open()

lst = c.GetCurrentTopics

c.Close()

End Using

' check if the list is populated and set the datasource of the listview
If Not lst.Count = 0 Then

lvCurrentTopics.DataSource = lst

lvCurrentTopics.DataBind()

Else

lvCurrentTopics.Visible = False

End If

Catch ex As Exception
lvCurrentTopics.Visible = False
' send me the error
End Try

End Sub</pre>