We are using the excellent ELMAH to deal with unhandled exceptions in an ASP.NET 3.5 web application. This works extremely well for all of the site apart from WCF services which are being consumed using the REST features. When an exception occurs within the operation methods that is not handled by the application code, WCF handles it in various ways depending on the service contracts and configuration settings. This means that the exception does not end up firing the ASP.NET HttpApplication.Error event that ELMAH uses. The two solutions I am aware of to deal with this are:
- Wrap all method calls in a try { } catch(Exception ex) { Elmah.ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(ex); throw; } to explicitly call Elmah within the catch block.
- Use IErrorHandler as described in Will Hughes' blog post Making WCF and ELMAH play nice together to factor out the call to ELMAH to a separate ErrorHandler.
The first option is extremely simple but is not exactly DRY. The second option only requires you to decorate each service with the custom attribute after implementing the attribute and the ErrorHandler. I have done this based on Will's work but I want to verify that this is the correct approach before posting the code.
Is there a better way that I have missed?
The MSDN documenation for asp.net wcf exception logging elmah