Error Handling

In general, the library returns a StatusOr if an error is possible. Some functions return objects that are not wrapped in a StatusOr<> but will themselves return a StatusOr<> to signal an error. For example, wrappers for asynchronous operations return future<StatusOr<T>>.

Applications should check if the StatusOr<T> contains a value before using it, much like how you might check that a pointer is not null before dereferencing it. Indeed, a StatusOr<T> object can be used like a smart-pointer to T, with the main difference being that when it does not hold a T it will instead hold a Status object with extra information about the error.

You can check that a StatusOr<T> contains a value by calling the .ok() method, or by using operator bool() (like with other smart pointers). If there is no value, you can access the contained Status object using the .status() member. If there is a value, you may access it by dereferencing with operator*() or operator->(). As with all smart pointers, callers must first check that the StatusOr<T> contains a value before dereferencing and accessing the contained value. Alternatively, callers may instead use the .value() member function which is defined to throw a RuntimeStatusError if there is no value.

Example

  namespace pubsub = ::google::cloud::pubsub;
  [](pubsub::TopicAdminClient client, std::string const& project_id) {
    // The actual type of `topic` is
    // google::cloud::StatusOr<google::pubsub::v1::Topic>, but
    // we expect it'll most often be declared with auto like this.
    for (auto& topic : client.ListTopics(project_id)) {
      // Use `topic` like a smart pointer; check it before de-referencing
      if (!topic) {
        // `topic` doesn't contain a value, so `.status()` will contain error
        // info
        std::cerr << topic.status() << "\n";
        break;
      }
      std::cout << topic->DebugString() << "\n";
    }
  }

See Also

google::cloud::future for more details on the type returned by asynchronous operations.