Discover if exception is thrown in finally part of try-finally block

Question

I have a simple question an simple part of code, some basic try-finally block:

try {
  // Some code which can throw an Exception
} finally {
  // Some code which also can throw an Exception
}

My main question would be: Is there any way we can discover is Exception thrown in finally block without using catch and some local variables to pass information between blocks?

I have few situations where this can be useful, and I don't want to add some ugly unnecessary catch blocks to just set some variable and throw Exception again. First example is that in case when I'm in some Spring or container managed transactional method, and in try block Exception occurred. I need to create new transaction in finally to work with database in that case. Second example is that I don't want to my original Exception be masked by Exception thrown in finally block, but if there was no Exception I will throw it from finally (if there was any).

I know it all can be done with catch but is there any other way, some metadata in Java or anything else? Also it can be helpful if we can assume that this will be executed in one Thread, so maybe there is some way to discover Exception bounded to current Thread?

Answer 1

It's something that has long frustrated me.

I normally declare a variable exceptionThrown=true at the top and set it to false just before returning. Then you can test that in the finally handler. I think that's better than catching and re-throwing because the latter approach will mess up the stack trace.

I'm surprised neither Java nor C# has a better way of handling this