Real world processing: TTS and exceptions

Hi everyone,

This is my first post in my blog, so I will start with something which bugs me right from the start of my work with Axapta.
What I find the major flaw in the X++ design is the fact that when exception is thrown, the main, outermost transaction is automatically rolled back, and there is no support for nested transactions. Automatic rollback is even advertised as a 'feature'.

That simple thing is preventing code in AX from doing the real world mass processing, as any exception that will be generated (from the code you have no control over) will destroy all work done so far, even if in particular situation your code is perfectly capable of handling the problem. In fact it should be your, designer's decision about the scale of the problem. Your code has to decide about scale of the problem: it's local, and there's special path to restore from that error- let's go with backup scenario. Outgrows foreseen options? Let's escalate.

Auto-rollback executed as a part of exception is simply taking that decision away from your code and that substantially cripples the number of ways processing can be designed.

Next time I will try to highlight possible solutions to that fundamental issue.
Please do not hesitate to scribble me a comment with your view.