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Whilst analysing some legacy code with FXCop, it occurred to me is it really that bad to catch a general exception error within a try block or should you be looking for a specific exception. Thoughts on a postcard please.
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As you can see in the following code snippet, even if you know which exceptions the method might throw, you can't simply catch them. You need to catch the generic Exception class and then check the type of its cause. This code is not only cumbersome to implement, but it's also hard to read.
Generally, you should only catch exceptions that you know how to handle. The purpose of exceptions bubbling up is to allow other parts of the code catch them if they can handle them, so catching all exceptions at one level is probably not going to get you a desired result.
lang. Throwable is a bad idea because in order to catch them you have to declare at your method signature e.g. public void doSomething() throws Throwable. When you do this, nobody knows what kind of Error this method is going to throw, and until you know what is the problem, how can you resolve that.
The generic exception handler can handle all the exceptions but you should place is at the end, if you place it at the before all the catch blocks then it will display the generic message. You always want to give the user a meaningful message for each type of exception rather then a generic message.
Obviously this is one of those questions where the only real answer is "it depends."
The main thing it depends on is where your are catching the exception. In general libraries should be more conservative with catching exceptions whereas at the top level of your program (e.g. in your main method or in the top of the action method in a controller, etc) you can be more liberal with what you catch.
The reason for this is that e.g. you don't want to catch all exceptions in a library because you may mask problems that have nothing to do with your library, like "OutOfMemoryException" which you really would prefer bubbles up so that the user can be notified, etc. On the other hand, if you are talking about catching exceptions inside your main() method which catches the exception, displays it and then exits... well, it's probably safe to catch just about any exception here.
The most important rule about catching all exceptions is that you should never just swallow all exceptions silently... e.g. something like this in Java:
try { something(); } catch (Exception ex) {} or this in Python:
try: something() except: pass Because these can be some of the hardest issues to track down.
A good rule of thumb is that you should only catch exceptions that you can properly deal with yourself. If you cannot handle the exception completely then you should let it bubble up to someone who can.
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