Idiom for partial failures

[Rob Gaddi]

On 2/20/20 9:30 AM, David Wihl wrote:
> 
> (first post)
> 
> I'm working on the Python client library [0]for the Google Ads API [1]. In some cases, we can start a request with a partial failure [2] flag = True. This means that the request may contain say 1000 operations. If any of the operations fail, the request will return with a success status without an exception. Then the developer has to iterate through the list of operation return statuses to determine which specific ones failed (example [3]).
> 
> I believe that it would be more idiomatic in Python (and other languages like Ruby) to throw an exception when one of these partial errors occur. That way there would be the same control flow if a major or minor error occurred.
> 
> The team is asking me for other examples or justification of this being idiomatic of Python. Can you recommend any examples or related best practices?
> 
> [0] https://github.com/googleads/google-ads-python
> 
> [1] https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/start
> 
> [2] https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/best-practices/partial-failures
> 
> [3] https://github.com/googleads/google-ads-python/blob/master/examples/error_handling/handle_partial_failure.py
> 
> Thanks!
> -David
> 

Potentially stupid question, does your library to the API have to support 
partial failures?  Sure Google Ads does, but does it really add value to do so? 
And then you've got to decide what to DO with those partially failed results.

You could, as a library, just say "No, this library never sets the 
partial_failure field.  We only support atomic transactions that fully succeed 
or fully fail and raise an exception."  Makes your life a lot easier; so unless 
it makes your customer's lives a lot harder...