PreviousNext

DCE Errors and DCE Messages

An application that wishes to use the DCE message facilities must organize all of its message text into a separate file which is compiled by the sams utility to generate a message catalog. The result of the sams compilation is that a set of DCE-consistent, application-specific codes for all the messages (not only errors) is generated. Use of the DCE facilities thus guarantees that application-specific status codes will be disjoint from those used by DCE for fault and comm status values, and for API calls. The application can then use exactly the same error handling and reporting strategy for application RPC calls as for API calls.

Of course, generating the message catalogs is only one aspect of using the DCE facilities. The DCE routines that access the message catalogs to output the messages must also be used.