Error handling in context managers

[Israel Brewster]

I generally use context managers for my SQL database connections, so I can just write code like:

with psql_cursor() as cursor:
    <do whatever>

And the context manager takes care of making a connection (or getting a connection from a pool, more likely), and cleaning up after the fact (such as putting the connection back in the pool), even if something goes wrong. Simple, elegant, and works well.

The problem is that, from time to time, I can't get a connection, the result being that cursor is None, and attempting to use it results in an AttributeError. So my instinctive reaction is to wrap the potentially offending code in a try block, such that if I get that AttributeError I can decide how I want to handle the "no connection" case. This, of course, results in code like:

try:
	with psql_cursor() as cursor:
		<do whatever>
except AttributeError as e:
	<handle no-connection case>

I could also wrap the code within the context manager in an if block checking for if cursor is not None, but while perhaps a bit clearer as to the purpose, now I've got an extra check that will not be needed most of the time (albeit a quite inexpensive check).

The difficulty I have with either of these solutions, however, is that they feel ugly to me - and wrapping the context manager in a try block almost seems to defeat the purpose of the context manager in the first place - If I'm going to be catching errors anyway, why not just do the cleanup there rather than hiding it in the context manager?

Now don't get me wrong - neither of these issues is terribly significant to me. I'll happily wrap all the context manager calls in a try block and move on with life if that it in fact the best option. It's just my gut says "there should be a better way", so I figured I'd ask: *is* there a better way? Perhaps some way I could handle the error internally to the context manager, such that it just dumps me back out? Of course, that might not work, given that I may need to do something different *after* the context manager, depending on if I was able to get a connection, but it's a thought. Options?

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Israel Brewster
Systems Analyst II
Ravn Alaska
5245 Airport Industrial Rd
Fairbanks, AK 99709
(907) 450-7293
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