Thursday, 14 July 2011

Non expected exception on IPAddress.TryParse

Lately, for the one of our client we implemented a functionality which uses Geo Location as a basic visitor recognition. The problem appeared after the functionality had been promoted to the live environment - it simple did not work. After a quick investigation we founded that the problem is caused by Akamai which acts as a proxy for whole domain.

The solution itself is pretty simple. Akamai can be configured so that it sends additional Http Request Header with original IP. I just thought that some basic validation on this header value would be great, so I have added something like code below:
var headerIp = request.Headers["True-Client-IP"];
IPAddress akamaiIpAddress = IPAddress.None;
var isValidIp = IPAddress.TryParse(headerIp, out akamaiIpAddress);

As you can see I laveraged on IpAddress class to determine whether sent header is correct. The problem was that if there was no header I had had the exception on that line. Why? The answer is very simple, and very unexpected - you can not pass null as a first parameter. I changed this line slightly in the following manner:

var headerIp = request.Headers["True-Client-IP"] ?? string.Empty;

and problem disappeared. I always thought that TryParse method on any object should swallow any exception, because it is expected from it. This is one of the most deceiving thing I have met in .NET. Does anyone know if any other TryParse method potentially throws exceptions as well?

1 comment:

  1. While all of the 'standard', numeric types indeed implement TryParse that never throws, this behaviour is only expected by convention. Examples with documented thrown exceptions (apart from IPAdress.TryParse) include DateTime and Enum. Although IPAddress is particularly nasty in this regard, as it will also throw when it encounters non-ASCII characters in the String.

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