Exception handling is often underrated and overlooked, but it is as important as its rest. Let us shed some light on the most effective practices to help you to handle exceptions in Java in the most effective possible way.
We do not like exceptions, but we always have to deal with them.
Here we have for you best practices to handle exceptions according to Industry standards.
WAYS TO HANDLE EXCEPTIONS IN JAVA
Use Some Exceptions
Base classes of the Exception hierarchy do not provide any useful information. For this reason, Java has so many exceptions classes, such as IOException, with further sub categorised as FileNotFoundException, EOFException, etc. We should always flip and catch specific exception classes so that the caller will know the leading cause of the exception quite easily and process them. This makes debugging a little easy and helps client applications handle exceptions appropriately. You can also consider a java certification training to learn in-depth about Java.
Catch Late
Since Java enforces to either handle the looked exception or to declare it in the method signature, sometimes it has been seen that developers tend to catch the exception and log the errors. But this practice is a little harmful because the caller program does not get a notification for the exception. We should use exceptions only when we can tackle them efficiently. While implementing any feature, one should always throw exceptions back to the caller and decide how to tackle them.
Closing Resources
Since exceptions stop the processing of the program, the programmer should close all the resources in the final block or use Java try-with-resources enhancement to let java runtime close it for you.
Logging Exceptions
The programmer should always log the exception message. And, while throwing exceptions, always provide a clear message so that the caller could know quite easily why the exception has occurred. We should always keep away from an empty catch block that absorbs the exception and doesn’t provide any relevant details except debugging.
Use Exceptions Sensibly
Exceptions are expensive, and sometimes it’s not required to throw and catch exceptions at all. We can take back a boolean variable to the caller program to indicate whether an operation was completed or not. This is helpful where the process is non-compulsory, and you don’t want your program to get stuck because it fails.
Document the Exceptions Thrown
Use Javadoc @throws to identify the exceptions thrown by the method clearly; it’s amicable when you are giving an interface to other applications to use.
Single Catch Block For Multiple Exceptions
The maximum time we log exception details and provide a message to the user, in this case, we should use the Java feature for handling multiple exceptions in a single catch block. This approach will reduce our code size, and it will look cleaner too.
Using Custom Exceptions
It’s always better to define an exception handling strategy at the design time. Rather than throwing and catching multiple exceptions, we can create a custom exception with an error code. And the caller program can handle these error codes. It’s also smart to make a utility method to process different error codes and use them.
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