What is a good practise of executing some operation and returning boolean value indicating successfulness of that in Java?

Question

What I mean is, I read that a good way to write a method is by being guided with a rule: one method should do only one task. And if I have different sequential operations, then I need to split the method into several ones. It should make code cleaner and simple, self-explaining method names. But if I want to implement method which should do something and then return boolean value – true is success, false if failed. For example, assume we have setter called setObjectValue(). [again, it is just an example].

Question: Would it be good to use this name and return boolean values, or should it be something as: isSuccessfullsetObjectValue(), setObjectValueAndCheckIsOk(), or should there be two methods or what? Because name "setObjectValue()" doesn't tell you that the method is doing something besides setting value.

Answer 1

Unless there's a good reason, I would normally use Exceptions to indicate this. This has two benefits:

1. You follow the convention of 1 method - 1 idea
2. You force yourself (if the Exception is checked) to handle the failure case. If you return a boolean, then the code could easily ignore this case.

If you do something like this:

try{

  setObjectValue("foo")
} catch(SomeKindOfException e){
  //handle
} 

Then you get the further benefit of it reading like English: "try to set the object value, but if you can't then handle it by ... "