How do I validate a field type in a trigger?

Question

I have a trigger which fires on Lead (after update) . We have an object called Finance which stores some financial information about each lead. When the trigger fires, it pushes any updates to certain fields into a finance record. What I have written works great, unless a user decides to input an invalid email, or the record owner is inactive. An APEX error is thrown, which to most users looks like gibberish and is a little scary.

What I would like to do is check in my trigger whether or not the email is valid so that users don't receive a confusing error. How can I go about checking whether a field's content is a valid type? I would like to stay away from using some sort of regex, because there are a couple other fields that I would like to apply this method to, and I'd rather not maintain a list of regex.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could catch the validation error in your trigger:

try {
    upsert financeRecord;
} catch (Exception e) {
    // do whatever you'd like to on an exception here
}