Best way to return status flag and message from a method in Java

Question

I have a deceptively simple scenario, and I want a simple solution, but it\'s not obvious which is \"most correct\" or \"most Java\".

Let\'s say I have a small authe

Answer 1

I would most probably go for something like :

class SomeClass {
public int authenticate (Client client) {
//returns 0 if success otherwise one value per possible failure
}
public String getAuthenticationResultMessage (int authenticateResult) {}
//returns message associated to authenticateResult
}

With this "design", you can ask for a message only when authentication fails (which I hope is the scenario that occurs 99,99% of time ;))

It may also be of good practice to delegate message resolution to another Class. But it depends of your application needs (mostly, does it need i18n ?)