>>Hi,
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>>I am looking for input on how your UI layer handles messages of failure to update database because of constraint violation. For example, if a user enters a value in a FK column that has not match in UNIQUE field of primary table, this will cause the update to return an error. The error message is very long and very technical in nature. Do you show the entire message to your users and hope they understand? Or what other approaches you use?
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>>TIA for any input.
>
>Generally I log the error details if possible for developer reference and present the user the 'short' version of an error. "The application has encountered a " + some simple wording of the error type + "error and has to close/reload/burn the server to the ground/whatever".
>
>Give a user a nice convoluted error message and they generally get overexcited.

I think we are talking about different things. I am talking about "error" that user receives very often because they entered the data incorrectly. And you are talking about some more technical issue that is either a bug or problem that is not caused by user entry. For example, in my app user has to enter, say, account number in a P.O. If he enters an account that does not have an entry in the list of accounts, the update will fail and he should be notified of that. So I guess I should just "translate" the technical message created by SQL Server into a user friendly one.