Exception.WithData method

[Khaos66]

Exceptions all have a Data property, that no one uses. Thats sad. Because there could be additional information about the context of the exception, that doesn't fit in the Message property or that should be readable by code and not be parsed from the Message.

I think part of the problem is that Data is hard to set, when throwing an Exception.
So why not adding a WithData(string key, object value) method, to handle this issue like so?

throw new ArgumentException($"Invalid value for {nameof(myParam)}").WithData("value", myParam);

[Khaos66]

And while we're waiting...
This can easily be done with an extension method like this

public static class ExceptionExtensions
{
    public static void WithData(this Exception e, string key, object value) => e.Data[key] = value;
}

[ufcpp]

throw new ArgumentException($"Invalid value for {nameof(myParam)}") { Data = { { "value", myParam } };

[Khaos66]

Yes. But that's what I refered to as 'Data is hard to set' ;)

[svick]

You can already use code like the following:

throw new ArgumentException($"Invalid value for {nameof(myParam)}") { Data = { ["value"] = myParam } };

While this is more complicated than the suggested WithData, I think the difference is not that much and I'm not convinced it would lead to a significantly wider adoption of Data.

[Khaos66]

That might be true