Programming Guides › Programming Guide for Java › Java Utilities Package › Result Class

Result Class

The Result class, SmApiResult, stores the result of a SiteMinder Java API request. A SiteMinder result contains the following elements:

• Facility. Origin of the result. For example, the result might originate on the client or server.
• Severity. Significance of the result, such as informational or warning.
• Status. Status code of the result. Status codes are unique within each facility. You can use a facility’s unique status code to distinguish a particular result from other results that might have originated from the facility.
• Message. Additional information about the result, such as descriptive text or numeric details.

A result might also include a reason code. For example, a password policy result might include a reason code of 1001, meaning that the password does not contain the required minimum number of characters. To find a reason code for a result, call getReason().

All server-side errors are returned as results, not as exceptions. However, when a client-side exception is thrown, an SmApiResult object is embedded in the exception.

Interpret a Result Object

Each result object and its Facility/Severity/Status combination are represented by a unique value. These unique values are associated with predefined constants defined in the SmApiResult class—for example, SERVER_CONFIGURATION_FAILURE.

To determine the Facility/Severity/Status information for a result, you can call the equals() method to compare the returned SmApiResult object with the result constants.

• Facility: FACILITY_CONNECTION
• Severity: SEVERITY_ERROR
• Status: 4
• Message: Unable to get server configuration

You can output a result object as a string—for example, you can generate a result string by calling toString() on the SmApiResult object.

A result string has five space-separated name/value pairs in the following format:

[facility=facility severity=severity reason=reason
status=statusCode message=message]

For example, suppose you call toString() for an SmApiResult object that occurs because a user attempted to create a password with fewer than the minimum number of alphabetic characters. The method might return a result string that looks like this:

[facility=4 severity=3 reason=1008 status=13 message=nArg=1,Arg1=3]

The fields in the result have the following meanings:

• facility=4. The result originated on the server.
• severity=3. The result is an error.
• reason=1008. The error occurred because the requested password has fewer than the minimum number of alphabetic characters required for passwords.
• status=13. The unique result status code for this facility.
• message=nArg=1,Arg1=3. An additional description of the result. The two parts to this field have the following meanings:
  • nArg1=1. The error contains just one error description.
  • Arg1=3. The error description is 3. In the context of reason code 1008, the Arg1 value means that a password is required to have a minimum of 3 alphabetic characters.

Core Methods in the Result Class

The core methods of the SmApiResult class include: