Ready to save your customer record? Don’t forget to wrap your call in a try/catch block, right? You need to handle the case when the save is successful...AND...you need to handle the case when the save is unsuccessful.

• What if your user forgot to enter some data?
• What if the value they entered for the email address on your custom form is incorrect?
• What if … any of 1000 other things go wrong when you try to save that record.

Try/catch blocks are pretty straight forward:

var customer = record.create({ type: 'customer' });
customer.setValue({ fieldId: 'companyname', value: 'DataTek Software' });

try {
  var customerId = customer.save()
} catch(ex) {
  log.error({ title: "Error saving customer", details: ex.message });
  // TODO: more logic needed here to make it nice for the user
}

But how many times do you use record.save() in your code? What about searches? What about record.submitFields()? They’re all API calls that can fail. Are you handling them all? That a lot of try/catch blocks with it’s own error logging scattered throughout your code.

tryCatch() is a simple custom NetSuite module that you can use to easily add try/catch blocks and error logging to your SuiteScript without cluttering your code and taking away from the readability and maintainability of your code.

Here’s the same example but using the tryCatch() function:

var customer = record.create({ type: 'customer' });
customer.setValue({ fieldId: 'companyname', value: 'DataTek Software' });

var create = tryCatch(customer.save);
if (create.isSuccess) {
  var customerId = create.result;
}

The tryCatch() function automatically wraps your function call in a try/catch block and will automatically log the error with a stack trace if an error is encountered. The object returned by tryCatch() contains an isSuccess property to tell you if the function call was successful or not. The return value of the function that was called will be in the result property.

In the example above, if the customer creation was successful, the isSuccess property will be true and the result property will be the internal ID of the newly created customer, since that’s what the record.save() function returns.

If the customer creation was unsuccessful, the isSuccess property will be false and the message property will contain the message exception. If you need it, the stack property will contain the stack trace for the exception.

The tryCatch() function can also pass any number of parameters to the function you want to call. Just pass them as additional parameters to tryCatch() and they’ll be passed along to your function. For example:

var recordId = record.submitFields({ type: 'customer', id: customerId, values: fieldValues });

becomes

var update = tryCatch(record.submitFields, { type: 'customer', id: customerId, values: fieldValues });

When using tryCatch(), store the variable in a verb that indicates what action you’re performing, like create, update, or search. When checking create.isSuccess with that variable naming convention, it will be easier to understand when you’re reading your code six months from now.

You can download tryCatch and other libraries here: https://github.com/datatek-software/netsuite-helpers