Check Internet Connection

[Tyler Wiebe]

I'm currently making an application that will display a notification when I receive a new email in my gmail account, and that works fine, but if my internet connection gets disconnected while it's checking if I have any new messages, it'll get an error at whatever spot it's at in the code.

I've purposefully disconnected it numerous times, and I've gotten an error at about 5 different places in the code when ever I disconnect from the internet. I'm wondering, is it possible to fix this? Maybe a try, catch, so that if an error does occur, in the catch, it'll check if there's an internet connection, and if there is a connection, it'll display the error, and if there is no connection, it'll just blame that to be the cause and ignore it.

I know that's not efficient, so any help is much appreciated.

[GaryTexmo]

The thing with a network connection is that even if you establish that it works before you start your code, you could lose it at any time. I would recommend encapsulating the whole thing inside a try/catch (which you should probably do already if you haven't yet) and then consider using sub try/catch blocks inside that to further refine your error reporting.

You could also consider having your program operate as a state machine, that way if you do lose your connection you can quickly return to the last successful state when the connection works again. If it's lost, you can enter a state that attempts to reconnect using a Timer at set intervals. Make sure you make the interval long enough so that you aren't stacking up on your timeouts, or only allow one attempt at a time... that kind of thing.

I hope that helps... good luck!