[Xapian-discuss] Why is a "DocNotFoundError" when deleting a document a Fatal error in php?

[Arjen van der Meijden]

It turns out that also working around the issue using something like 
this won't work:

$doc = Database_get_document($database, $docId);
if($doc != null)
{
	WritableDatabase_delete_document($database, $docId);
	WritableDatabase_flush($database);
}

The get_document appearantly also yields a fatal error. In php it is 
common return false or null in a "it doesn't exist" case.

Best regards,

Arjen

Arjen van der Meijden wrote:
> Currently I've built a php-based indexer for a new set-up were we'd like 
> to use Xapian as back-end. All works quite well, except deleting a 
> document. It may occur that the index has not been synced before a 
> document is to be deleted again.
> 
> I.e. a document is queued to be added, but also queued to be deleted. 
> Now the prettiest way to handle that is just to remove the document from 
> the queue, but that's a lot of extra checks for a few rare cases I don't 
> really like to do.
> So I basically just delete the document, if it doesn't exist well, 
> that's perfectly ok for me. But Xapian considers it an error and throws 
> the DocNotFoundError, which gets wrapped to a Fatal Error.
> PHP cannot recover from such a situation as easily as C or Java can 
> (try-catch doesn't exist in php4, nor would it work for such a situation 
> in 5 I think).
> Of course I can write my own error handler in php, but it may also be 
> worth to consider to lower the severity of such a case?
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Arjen
> 
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