Designing gRPC Services: Error Handling Best Practices

In REST, we use HTTP Status Codes (404, 500). In gRPC, we use `RpcException`. But simply throwing exceptions is not enough for rich error details.

The Status Model

Google’s API Design Guide recommends returning a rich `Status` object containing a list of `Any` details.

var status = new Google.Rpc.Status
{
    Code = (int)Code.InvalidArgument,
    Message = "Invalid Order Request",
    Details = {
        Any.Pack(new BadRequest { FieldViolations = { ... } })
    }
};
throw status.ToRpcException();

This allows the client to deserialize the structured error (e.g., specific field validation errors) rather than parsing a string message.


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