The need to acquire an error number space is related to the larger issue of messaging in general. Applications typically need messages both for error reporting and for other status reporting and informational purposes. The recommended practice is to use messages catalogs for all messaging.
Message catalogs permit applications to deal with messages as numerical constants and to keep all associated text separate from the application itself. This is especially important for internationalization requirements; applications deal only with generic error numbers; locale-specific message text is kept in separate catalogs.
Message numbers are partitioned by technology, component, and code. The technology and component fields select a message catalog, and the code indexes messages within a catalog. The requirement to have a unique application-specific error number space can be met by adopting a unique component field within a given technology. To facilitate this, OSF makes component numbers available in two ways.
1. Within the dce technology (the default core component technology field used by DCE implementations), OSF sets aside two components guaranteed not to be used by DCE implementations.
2. OSF sets aside an ISV technology and maintains a registry of component numbers which may be assigned to ISVs.
This makes two levels of uniqueness available to applications. An unregistered application can guarantee that its message number space does not conflict with that of DCE implementations or of any registered ISV components by using one of the reserved component numbers within the dce technology space. This does not, of course, guarantee that the application's message number space does not conflict with that of other unregistered applications. This is a sufficient guarantee only for applications that do not communicate or share application-specific message catalogs with other unregistered applications. For example, the client side of an unregistered application may encounter error number conflicts if it makes RPCs to the server side of an application that uses an overlapping error number space.
Note: A related restriction on such non-registered applications is that they must install their message catalogs in some application-specific place. Since message catalog names depend on component numbers, other applications may be using the same message catalog names.
Applications that need to guarantee a unique error number space among all DCE applications should use a registered component number obtained from OSF. This is the recommended procedure for applications that have public interfaces that are likely to be called by other applications.
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