What's the idiomatic way of creating a Rust Error shim? - error-handling

Question

I have two error types that are defined in external crates. Let's call them foo::Error and bar::Error. Because they are both defined externally, I cannot create a direct From or Into conversion between the two.
In my own crate, I'm using implementing a trait from bar, which expects return values of Result<T, bar::Error>. In the methods of my implementation, I'm calling functions from foo, which return many Result<T, foo::Error> types.
I would like to map these foo::Error errors to bar::Error errors, so that my trait implementation is neat, but the best that I can do is create a separate shim error, and then have a clunky .map_err(ShimErr::from)? on everything. This can start to litter up my code if I'm calling many foo:: functions in my implementation.
use foo;
use bar;
struct ShimErr(foo::Error);
impl From<foo::Error> for ShimErr {
fn from(e: foo::Error) -> Self {
Self(e)
}
}
impl From<ShimErr> for bar::Error {
fn from(e: ShimErr) -> Self {
Self{}
}
}
struct MyTraitImpl {}
impl bar::SomeTrait for MyTraitImpl {
fn do_something() -> Result<i32, bar::Error> {
// FIXME: THIS IS CLUNKY
let foo_val: i32 = foo::call_something().map_err(ShimErr::from)?;
Ok(foo_val * 2)
}
}
Is there a better way? In an ideal world, there would be a way to just use ?
If I remove map_err and try to use ? directly:
error[E0277]: `?` couldn't convert the error to `bar::Error`
--> shimtest.rs:32:49
|
32 | let foo_val: i32 = foo::call_something()?;
| ^ the trait `std::convert::From<foo::Error>` is not implemented for `bar::Error`
|
= note: the question mark operation (`?`) implicitly performs a conversion on the error value using the `From` trait
= help: the following implementations were found:
<bar::Error as std::convert::From<ShimErr>>
= note: required by `std::convert::From::from`

Answer 1

The way I handle multiple different errors from other crates would be to make my own Error enum and use that instead of other errors directly.
So instead of a tuple struct that only contains foo::Error, you can create an enum that can have both foo::Error and bar::Error. After this, you can convert all the errors to the custom enum error with ?.
In certain cases, I think you'll still need to use something like .map_err(Into::into) occasionally, but usually only when the variable being returned is a Result with an external error.
use bar::Error as BarError;
use foo::Error as FooError;
use std::fmt::{Display, Formatter, Result as FmtResult};
use std::result::Result as StdResult;
/// Common result type that uses the custom error
pub type Result<T> = StdResult<T, Error>;
/// Common error type used as a holder for errors from various other libraries.
#[derive(Debug)]
pub enum Error {
Bar(BarError),
Foo(FooError),
}
impl From<BarError> for Error {
fn from(err: BarError) -> Error {
Error::Bar(err)
}
}
impl From<FooError> for Error {
fn from(err: FooError) -> Error {
Error::Foo(err)
}
}
impl Display for Error {
fn fmt(&self, f: &mut Formatter) -> FmtResult {
match *self {
Error::Bar(ref inner) => inner.fmt(f),
Error::Foo(ref inner) => inner.fmt(f),
}
}
}
impl StdError for Error {
fn description(&self) -> &str {
match *self {
Error::Bar(ref inner) => inner.description(),
Error::Foo(ref inner) => inner.description(),
}
}
}
Now you can use the custom Result and Error as follows.
// this Result is now our custom Result type with custom error
// same as std::result::Result<i32, Error> (with Error as our custom error)
fn do_something() -> Result<i32> {
let foo_val: i32 = foo::call_something()?; // should convert to our custom error
Ok(foo_val * 2)
}
fn do_something_else() -> Result<i32> {
// directly returning a Result<> with a different error type will need map_err
foo::call_something().map_err(Into::into)
}