Three Rules for Effective Exception Handling

Exceptions in Java provide a consistent mechanism for identifying and responding to error conditions. Effective exception handling will make your programs more robust and easier to debug. Exceptions are a tremendous debugging aid because they help answer these three questions:

What went wrong?
Where did it go wrong?
Why did it go wrong?

Here are the three rules for effective exception handling:

1. Be Specific (i.e. Define your custom exception to give more precise information about the exception that has occured).

2. Throw early (if you find an errorneous piece of information/code, throw the exception then and there instead of letting it flow to the next level). e.g. before opening a file check if the fileName string is null and throw an exception before a NullPointerException is thrown with a trace of FileNotFoundException.

3. Catch Late (if you encounter an exception, do not proceed with the remaining tasks if they are related/dependent on the earlier ones).

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[Resource-Type: Article, Category: Java/Exception Handling,XRating: 4,Level: All]