How to report user errors

[Jacob Kroon <jacob kroon gmail com>]

Hi,

I'm trying to lay out a strategy for implementing a way to report errors 
to users of
a library I'm working on. The scenario is pretty similar to a 
GtkContainer which
has multiple children in it, so for easy explanation I'll use it as an 
example.

Let's say the container class had a method which would perform an 
operation on all
of it's children, and that this operation could fail. If an error 
occures somewhere down
in the hierarchy I wan't the caller to be notified, a message, and if it 
was a child who
caused the error, report it too.

So the container method can not just _only_ return an error code, or a 
gboolean,
because in some cases I would need access to a possibly offending child.

One way I was thinking of was to use signals. Each child would provide 
an "error" signal,
which the container would connect to. If a child fails, it emits the 
signal, the container gets
notified, and then it knows which child failed, and itself can emit its 
own "error" signal, where
it provides the child as an argument.

So the caller of the container method would itself have to connect to 
the container error signal,
in order to get access to the error message, and a possibly offending child.

That is the basic scenario, my problem is slightly more complicated, as 
I have a "container" class,
with children, but the children themself have "subchildren" which could 
also fail during the
operation, and they might also need to report themself to the caller of 
the container method.

Would this strategy be labeled as misuse of GSignals ? :)

If so, what are the options ?

If anyone can think of "the right way" to do this, I'd appreciate it.

//Jacob