How to handle httparty errors rails - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am using some api with httparty gem
I have read this question:
How can I handle errors with HTTParty?
And there are two most upvoted answers how to handle errors
first one using response codes (which does not address connection failures)
response = HTTParty.get('http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.json')
case response.code
when 200
puts "All good!"
when 404
puts "O noes not found!"
when 500...600
puts "ZOMG ERROR #{response.code}"
end
And the second - catching errors.
begin
HTTParty.get('http://google.com')
rescue HTTParty::Error
# don´t do anything / whatever
rescue StandardError
# rescue instances of StandardError,
# i.e. Timeout::Error, SocketError etc
end
So what is the best practice do handle errors?
Do I need to handle connection failures?
Right now I am thinking of combining this two approaches like this:
begin
response = HTTParty.get(url)
case response.code
when 200
# do something
when 404
# show error
end
rescue HTTParty::Error => error
puts error.inspect
rescue => error
puts error.inspect
end
end
Is it a good approach to handle both connection error and response codes?
Or I am being to overcautious?

Answer 1

You definitely want to handle connection errors are they are exceptions outside the normal flow of your code, hence the name exceptions. These exceptions happen when connections timeout, connections are unreachable, etc, and handling them ensures your code is resilient to these types of failures.
As far as response codes, I would highly suggest you handle edge cases, or error response codes, so that your code is aware when there are things such as pages not found or bad requests which don't trigger exceptions.
In any case, it really depends on the code that you're writing and at this point is a matter of opinion but in my opinion and personal coding preference, handling both exceptions and error codes is not being overcautious but rather preventing future failures.