Java - Exception Handling Concepts

Exception Handling
Dr. P. Victer Paul, Indian Institute of Information Technology Kottayam

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Why?
 Users may use our programs in an unexpected ways.
 Due to design errors or coding errors, programs may fail in
unexpected ways during execution, or may result in an
abnormal/abrupt program termination
 It is programmer’s responsibility to produce robust code
that does not fail unexpectedly.
 Consequently, programmer must design error handling
into our programs.
 Java – provides clear mechanism to Handle the Exceptions
that happen during program execution.

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What you know…
 In C, using the term “ERROR” is used to represent the
unexpected interruption of code execution.
 Two types:
 Compile time Errors (Syntax and Semantic error)
 Runtime Errors (errors)

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Common Runtime Errors
 Dividing a number by zero.
 Accessing an element that is out of bounds of an
array.
 Trying to store incompatible data elements.
 Using negative value as array size.
 Trying to convert from string data to a specific data
value (e.g., converting string “abc” to integer value).
 File errors:
 Opening the file that does not exist
 opening a file in “read mode” that does not exist or
no read permission
 Opening a file in “write/update mode” which has
“read only” permission.

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Exceptions Handling in Java
 An abnormal condition that arises in a code sequence at
run time.
 In other words, an exception is a run-time error.
 A Java exception is an object that describes an
exceptional (that is, error) condition that has occurred in
a piece of code.
 When an exceptional condition arises, an object
representing that exception is created and thrown in the
method that caused the error.
 A program can deal with an exception object in one of
three ways:
 ignore it
 handle it where it occurs
 handle it an another place in the programDr. P. Victer Paul, Indian Institute of Information Technology Kottayam

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Exceptions Handling in Java
 Java provides a robust and object oriented way to handle
exception scenarios, known as Java Exception Handling.
 Java exception handling is managed via five keywords: try,
catch, throw, throws, and finally.
 Program statements that you want to monitor for
exceptions are contained within a try block.
 Catch block can handle it in some rational manner.
 System-generated exceptions are automatically thrown by the Java
run-time system.
 To manually throw an exception, use the keyword throw.
 Any exception that is thrown out of a method must be
specified as such by a throws clause.
 Any code that must be executed after a try block
completes (with/without exception)is put in a finally block.Dr. P. Victer Paul, Indian Institute of Information Technology Kottayam

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Syntax of Exception Handling Code
…
…
try {
// statements
}
catch( Exception-Type e)
{
// statements to process exception
}
..
..

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Without Exception Handling
class WithoutExceptionHandling{
public static void main(String[] args){
int a,b; float r;
a = 7; b = 0;
r = a/b;
System.out.println(“Result is “ + r);
System.out.println(“Program reached this line”);
}
} Dr. P. Victer Paul, Indian Institute of Information Technology Kottayam

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With Exception Handling
class WithExceptionHandling{
public static void main(String[] args){
int a,b; float r;
a = 7; b = 0;
try{
r = a/b;
System.out.println(“Result is “ + r);
}
catch(ArithmeticException e){
System.out.println(“ B is zero);
}
System.out.println(“Program reached this line”);
}
}
Program
Reaches here

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Exception Hierarchy
 All exception types are subclasses of the built-in class
Throwable.
 Throwable is at the top of the exception class hierarchy.
 Throwable are two subclasses partition exceptions into
two distinct branches.
 Exceptions
 Errors

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Java Exception Class Hierarchy
LinkageError
Error
AWTError
AWTException
Throwable
ClassNotFoundException
VirtualMachineError
IOException
Exception
RuntimeException
Object
ArithmeticException
NullPointerException
IndexOutOfBoundsException
Several more classes
IllegalArgumentException

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Exception Class
 Exception is used for exceptional conditions that user
programs should catch.
 This class is inherited to create subclass as programmer’s
own custom exception types.
 There is an important subclass of Exception, called
RuntimeException.
 Exceptions of this type are automatically defined for the
programs that a programmer write.

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Exception Class
LinkageError
Error
AWTError
AWTException
Throwable
VirtualMachineError
IOException
Exception
RuntimeException
Object
ArithmeticException
Exception describes errors
caused by your program
and external
circumstances. These
errors can be caught and
handled by your program.

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Runtime Exceptions
LinkageError
Error
AWTError
AWTException
Throwable
VirtualMachineError
IOException
Exception
RuntimeException
Object
ArithmeticException
RuntimeException is caused by
programming errors, such as bad
casting, accessing an out-of-bounds
array, and numeric errors.

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Error Exception
 The Error defines exceptions that are not expected to be
caught under normal circumstances by your program.
 Exceptions of type Error are used by the Java run-time
system to indicate errors having to do with the run-time
environment, itself.
 Stack overflow is an example of such an error.

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Error Exception Types
LinkageError
Error
AWTError
AWTException
Throwable
VirtualMachineError
IOException
Exception
RuntimeException
Object
ArithmeticException
System errors are thrown by JVM
and represented in the Error class.
The Error class describes internal
system errors. Such errors rarely
occur. If one does, there is little
you can do beyond notifying the
user and trying to terminate the
program gracefully.

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Error Exception Types

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Poll Question
 Consider the JVM stops execution of a java program due
to shortage of JVM memory. This scenario is
 A. Runtime Exception
 B. Error
 C. Checked Exception
 D. Exception

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Exception Types
 Exceptions fall into two categories:
 Checked Exceptions
 Unchecked Exceptions
 Checked exceptions are inherited from the core Java class
Exception.
 represent compile time exceptions that are coder responsibility to
check.
 the compiler will issue an error message.
 RuntimeException, Error and their subclasses are known
as unchecked exceptions.
 if not handled, your program will terminate with an appropriate
error message.

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Exception Types

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Exception Types
LinkageError
Error
AWTError
AWTException
Throwable
VirtualMachineError
IOException
Exception
RuntimeException
Object
ArithmeticException
Unchecked
exception.

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what happens when don’t handle
The call stack is quite useful for debugging, because it pinpoints the
precise sequence of steps that led to the errorDr. P. Victer Paul, Indian Institute of Information Technology Kottayam

Predict the output
23Dr. P. Victer Paul, Indian Institute of Information Technology Kottayam

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Poll Question
Output??
 A Compile Error
 B Inside
 C Inside
rest of the code
 D Inside
Null
rest of the code

Handling Exception
 Different mechanism.
 Simple try - catch
 try with multiple catch
 multiple exception with single catch
 nested try statements
 throw
 Throws
 try, catch and finally (exception with exit code)
 Java Exception Propagation

Simple try - catch
 The try block allows you to define a block of code to be
tested/monitor for errors while it is being executed.
 The catch block allows you to define a block of code to be
executed, if an error occurs in the try block.

Example

Try with multiple catch
 In some cases, more than one exception
could be raised by a single piece of
code.
 To handle this type of situation, you can
specify two or more catch clauses, each
catching a different type of exception.
 When an exception is thrown, each
catch statement is inspected in order,
and the first one whose type matches
that of the exception is executed.
 After one catch statement executes, the
others are bypassed

Try with multiple catch Ex

multiple exception with single catch
 When you use multiple catch statements, it is important
to remember that exception subclasses must come
before any of their superclasses.
 This is because a catch statement that uses a superclass
will catch exceptions of that type plus any of its
subclasses. Thus, a subclass would never be reached if it
came after its superclass.
 Further, in Java, unreachable code is an error.

multiple exception with single catch Ex

nested try statements
 The try statement can be nested.
 That is, a try statement can be inside the block of another
try.
 If an inner try statement does not have a catch handler
for a particular exception, the stack is unwound and the
next try statement’s catch handlers are inspected for a
match.
 This continues until one of the catch statements succeeds,
or until all of the nested try statements are exhausted.
 If no catch statement matches, then the Java run-time
system will handle the exception

nested try statements Ex

35
Poll Question
 Which of these is a super class of all errors and exceptions
in the Java language?
 A RunTimeExceptions
 B Throwable
 C Catchable
 D None of the above

Handling Exception
 Different mechanism.
 Simple try - catch
 try with multiple catch
 multiple exception with single catch
 nested try statements
 throw
 Throws
 try, catch and finally (exception with exit code)
 Java Exception Propagation

throw
 So far, you have only been catching exceptions that are
thrown by the Java run-time system.
 However, it is possible for your program to throw an
exception explicitly, using the throw statement.
 Syntax:
 Here, ThrowableInstance must be an object of type
Throwable or a subclass of Throwable.
 The flow of execution stops immediately after the throw
statement; any subsequent statements are not executed.
 If no matching catch is found, then the default exception
handler halts the program and prints the stack trace

throw

Throws
 If a method is capable of causing an exception that it does
not handle, it must specify this
 behavior so that callers of the method can guard
themselves against that exception.
 You do this by including a throws clause in the method’s
declaration.
 A throws clause lists the types of exceptions that a
method might throw.
 This is necessary for all exceptions, except those of type
Error or RuntimeException, or any of their subclasses.
 If they are not, a compile-time error will result.

Throws
 This is the general form of a method declaration that
includes a throws clause:
 exception-list is a comma-separated list of the exceptions
that a method can throw.
 First, you need to declare that throwOne( ) throws
IllegalAccessException.
 Second, main( ) must define a try/catch statement that
catches this exception.

Throws

try, catch and finally
 When exceptions are thrown, execution in a method takes
a rather abrupt, nonlinear path that alters the normal
flow through the method.
 This could be a problem in some methods. For example,
 if a method opens a file upon entry and closes it upon
exit,
 then you will not want the code that closes the file to
be bypassed by the exception-handling mechanism.
 The finally keyword is designed to address this
contingency

 finally creates a block of code that will be executed after
a try/catch block has completed and
 before the code following the try/catch block.
 The finally block will execute whether or not an exception
is thrown.

Java’s Built-in Exceptions
 Inside the standard package java.lang, Java defines
several exception classes.
 A few have been used by the preceding examples.

Creating Your Exception Subclasses
 Although Java’s built-in exceptions handle most common
errors
 user probably want to create your own exception types to
handle situations specific to your applications.
 This is quite easy to do: just define a subclass of
Exception (which is, of course, a subclass of Throwable).
class UserException extends Exception
{
}

class InvalidMobile extends Exception
{
InvalidMobile(String msg)
{
super(msg);
}
}

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The End…

Java - Exception Handling Concepts

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