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/****************************************************************************
**
** Copyright (C) 2011 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies).
** All rights reserved.
** Contact: Nokia Corporation (qt-info@nokia.com)
**
** This file is part of the documentation of the Qt Toolkit.
**
** $QT_BEGIN_LICENSE:FDL$
** No Commercial Usage
** This file contains pre-release code and may not be distributed.
** You may use this file in accordance with the terms and conditions
** contained in the Technology Preview License Agreement accompanying
** this package.
**
** GNU Free Documentation License
** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU Free
** Documentation License version 1.3 as published by the Free Software
** Foundation and appearing in the file included in the packaging of this
** file.
**
** If you have questions regarding the use of this file, please contact
** Nokia at qt-info@nokia.com.
** $QT_END_LICENSE$
**
****************************************************************************/
/*!
\page exceptionsafety.html
\title Exception Safety
\ingroup best-practices
\brief A guide to exception safety in Qt.
\bold {Preliminary warning}: Exception safety is not feature complete!
Common cases should work, but classes might still leak or even crash.
Qt itself will not throw exceptions. Instead, error codes are used.
In addition, some classes have user visible error messages, for example
\l QIODevice::errorString() or \l QSqlQuery::lastError().
This has historical and practical reasons - turning on exceptions
can increase the library size by over 20%.
The following sections describe Qt's behavior if exception support is
enabled at compile time.
\tableofcontents
\section1 Exception safe modules
\section2 Containers
Qt's \l{container classes} are generally exception neutral. They pass any
exception that happens within their contained type \c T to the user
while keeping their internal state valid.
Example:
\code
QList<QString> list;
...
try {
list.append("hello");
} catch (...) {
}
// list is safe to use - the exception did not affect it.
\endcode
Exceptions to that rule are containers for types that can throw during assignment
or copy constructions. For those types, functions that modify the container as well as
returning a value, are unsafe to use:
\code
MyType s = list.takeAt(2);
\endcode
If an exception occurs during the assignment of \c s, the value at index 2 is already
removed from the container, but hasn't been assigned to \c s yet. It is lost
without chance of recovery.
The correct way to write it:
\code
MyType s = list.at(2);
list.removeAt(2);
\endcode
If the assignment throws, the container still contains the value, no data loss occured.
Note that implicitly shared Qt classes will not throw in their assignment
operators or copy constructors, so the limitation above does not apply.
\section1 Out of Memory Handling
Most desktop operating systems overcommit memory. This means that \c malloc()
or \c{operator new} return a valid pointer, even though there is not enough
memory available at allocation time. On such systems, no exception of type
\c std::bad_alloc is thrown.
On all other operating systems, Qt will throw an exception of type std::bad_alloc
if any allocation fails. Allocations can fail if the system runs out of memory or
doesn't have enough continuous memory to allocate the requested size.
Exceptions to that rule are documented. As an example, QImage constructors will
create a \l{QImage::isNull()}{null} image if not enough memory exists instead
of throwing an exception.
\section1 Recovering from exceptions
Currently, the only supported use case for recovering from exceptions thrown
within Qt (for example due to out of memory) is to exit the event loop and do
some cleanup before exiting the application.
Typical use case:
\code
QApplication app(argc, argv);
...
try {
app.exec();
} catch (const std::bad_alloc &) {
// clean up here, e.g. save the session
// and close all config files.
return 0; // exit the application
}
\endcode
After an exception is thrown, the connection to the windowing server
might already be closed. It is not safe to call a GUI related function
after catching an exception.
\section1 Platform-Specific Exception Handling
\section2 The Symbian platform
The Symbian platform implements its own exception system that differs from the standard
C++ mechanism. When using Qt for the Symbian platform, and especially when writing code to
access Symbian functionality directly, it may be necessary to know about the underlying
implementation and how it interacts with Qt.
The \l{Exception Safety with Symbian} document shows how to use the facilities provided
by Qt to use exceptions as safely as possible.
*/
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