Exception Handling Guidelines & Best Practices

Don’t try to handle coding errors.

Unless your software is required to take extraordinary measures in error scenarios, don’t spend a lot of time designing it to detect and recover from programming errors. In the case of an out-of-bounds array index, divide-by zero error, or any other programming error, the best strategy is to fail fast (and leave an audit trail of the problem that can be used to troubleshoot it).

Avoid declaring lots of exception classes.

Create a new exception class only when you expect some handling of the code to take a significantly different action, based on the exception type. In my experience it is rarely the case and exception classes available in java API serve the purpose. Recast lower-level exceptions to higher-level ones whenever you raise an abstraction level.

Don’t let implementation details leak out of a method invocation as exceptions.

Otherwise, your users might think your software is broken. When low-level exceptions percolate up to a high-level handler, there’s little context to assist the handler in making informed decisions or reporting conditions that are traceable to any obvious cause. Recasting an exception whenever you cross an abstraction boundary enables exception handlers higher up in the call chain to make more informed decisions. If you want to include a problem trace when recasting them, you can always create a chained exception. A chained exception provides added context and holds a reference to the original lower level exception. You can repeatedly chain exceptions.

Provide context along with an exception.

What’s most important in exception handling is information that helps create an informed response. Exception classes hold information. You can design them to be packed with information in addition to the bare-bones stack trace information provided by default. You might include values of parameters that raised the exception, specific error text, or detailed information that could be useful to plan a recovery.

Handle exceptions as close to the problem as you can.

As a first line of defense, consider the initial requestor. If the caller knows enough to perform a corrective action, you can rectify the condition on the spot. If you propagate an exception far away from the source, it can be difficult to trace the source. Often objects further away from the problem can’t make meaningful decisions.

Use exceptions only to signal emergencies.

Exceptions shouldn’t be raised to indicate normal branching conditions that will alter the flow in the calling code. For example, a find operation may return zero, one, or many objects, so I wouldn’t raise an exception in this case. Instead, I’d design my find() method to return a null object or an empty collection. A dropped database connection, on the other hand, is a real emergency. There’s nothing that can be done to continue as planned.

Don’t repeatedly re-throw the same exception.

Although exceptions don’t cost anything until they’re raised, programs that frequently raise exceptions run more slowly.

Reference: Exception Handling Guidelines/Best Practices from our JCG partner Sanjeev Kumar at the Architect’s Diary blog.

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