Gfrktyl

I've written a method to check if a directory already exists on an FTP server. The only way I could see to make this work was to return a different result from the method if an exception is thrown - very bad practice in my opinion. Is there a better way to write this?

public bool DirectoryExists(string directory)

{

    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(directory))

        throw new ArgumentException("No directory was specified to check for");



    // Ensure directory is ended with / to avoid false positives

    if (!directory.EndsWith("/"))

        directory += "/";



    try

    {

        var request = (FtpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(directory);

        request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.ListDirectory;

        request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(Username, Password);



        using (request.GetResponse())

        {

            return true;

        }

    }

    catch (WebException)

    {

        return false;

    }

}

The connection hostname, username and password referred to within this block of code are auto properties set when the class is initialized.

• don't omit braces {} for single if statements. Using braces in this case will make your code less errorprone.



• 
  

  you want to return a state, which represents a specific states which shouldn't be restricted to only two states. This just calls for an enum.

  
  
  

  public enum FtpResponse
  
  {
  
      DirectoryExists, DirectoryNotFound, DirectoryNotSpecified
  
  }
  
  
  
  
  
  public FtpResponse DirectoryExists(string directory)  
  
  {
  
      if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(directory))
  
      {
  
           return FtpResponse.DirectoryNotSpecified;
  
      } 
  
      // the rest of the code
  
  
  
  }