For the Open Event android app we were using retofit 1.9 with an okhttp stack plus a gson parser but recently retrofit 2.0 was released and it was a major update in the sense that it a lot of things have been changed.

For starters, you don’t have to declare synchronous and asynchronous requests upfront and you can just decide that while executing. The code for that will look something like this. This is how we define our request methods in our api service

import retrofit.Call;
public interface APIService {
   @POST(“/list”)
   Call<Repo> loadRepo();
}

Now if we want to make a synchronous request, we can make it like

Call<Repo> call = service.loadRepo();
Repo repo = call.execute();

and for an asynchronous request, we can call enqueue()

Call<Repo> call = service.loadRepo();
call.enqueue(new Callback<Repo>() {
    @Override
    public void onResponse(Response<Repo> response) {
    // Get result Repo from response.body()    
    }
    @Override
    public void onFailure(Throwable t) {

    }
});

And another thing that changed in the async call throws a throwable on failure, so essentially the RetrofitError class is gone and since we were using that in our app, we had to modify the whole error handling in the app, basically from the grounds up.

So, when we decided to move to retrofit 2 after the stable version was released, we had to change a lot of code and the main part that was affected was the error handling. So, replacing the retrofitError class, I used the throwable directly to retrieve the error type something like this

if (error.getThrowable() instanceof IOException) { 
    errorType = “Timeout”; 
    errorDesc = String.valueOf(error.getThrowable().getCause()); 
} 
else if (error.getThrowable() instanceof IllegalStateException) {                 
    errorType = “ConversionError”; 
    errorDesc = String.valueOf(error.getThrowable().getCause()); 
} else { 
    errorType = “Other Error”; 
    errorDesc = String.valueOf(error.getThrowable().getLocalizedMessage()); 
}

This was ofcourse for all failure events. And to handle all response events I compared the HTTP status codes and displayed the errors :

Integer statusCode = response.getStatusCode(); 
if (statusCode.equals(404)) { 
    // Show Errors in a dialog
    showErrorDialog(“HTTP Error”, statusCode + “Api Not Found”); 
}

This is how we can compare other HTTP errors in retrofit and assign the correct status accordingly. I personally think that this is a better implementation than Retrofit 1.9 and the RetrofitError was a bit tedious to work with. It wasn’t very thought of before implementation because it was not easy to tell what kind of error exactly occured. With Response codes, one can see what are the exact error one faces and can gracefully handle these errors.