Related
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.
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.
Unless you are doing some logging and clean up code in the front end of your application, then I think it is bad to catch all exceptions.
My basic rule of thumb is to catch all the exceptions you expect and anything else is a bug.
If you catch everything and continue on, it's a bit like putting a sticking plaster over the warning light on your car dashboard. You can't see it anymore, but it doesn't mean everything is ok.
Yes! (except at the "top" of your application)
By catching an exception and allowing the code execution to continue, you are stating that you know how do deal with and circumvent, or fix a particular problem. You are stating that this is a recoverable situation. Catching Exception or SystemException means that you will catch problems like IO errors, network errors, out-of-memory errors, missing-code errors, null-pointer-dereferencing and the likes. It is a lie to say that you can deal with these.
In a well organised application, these unrecoverable problems should be handled high up the stack.
In addition, as code evolves, you don't want your function to catch a new exception that is added in the future to a called method.
In my opinion you should catch all exceptions you expect, but this rule applies to anything but your interface logic. All the way down the call stack you should probably create a way to catch all exceptions, do some logging/give user feedback and, if needed and possible, shut down gracefully.
Nothing is worse than an application crashing with some user unfriendly stacktrace dumped to the screen. Not only does it give (perhaps unwanted) insight into your code, but it also confuses your end-user, and sometimes even scares them away to a competing application.
There's been a lot of philosophical discussions (more like arguments) about this issue. Personally, I believe the worst thing you can do is swallow exceptions. The next worst is allowing an exception to bubble up to the surface where the user gets a nasty screen full of technical mumbo-jumbo.
Well, I don't see any difference between catching a general exception or a specific one, except that when having multiple catch blocks, you can react differently depending on what the exception is.
In conclusion, you will catch both IOException and NullPointerException with a generic Exception, but the way your program should react is probably different.
The point is twofold I think.
Firstly, if you don't know what exception has occurred how can you hope to recover from it. If you expect that a user might type a filename in wrong then you can expect a FileNotFoundException and tell the user to try again. If that same code generated a NullReferenceException and you simply told the user to try again they wouldn't know what had happened.
Secondly, the FxCop guidelines do focus on Library/Framework code - not all their rules are designed to be applicable to EXE's or ASP.Net web sites. So having a global exception handler that will log all exceptions and exit the application nicely is a good thing to have.
The problem with catching all exceptions is that you may be catching ones that you don't expect, or indeed ones that you should not be catching. The fact is that an exception of any kind indicates that something has gone wrong, and you have to sort it out before continuing otherwise you may end up with data integrity problems and other bugs that are not so easy to track down.
To give one example, in one project I implemented an exception type called CriticalException. This indicates an error condition that requires intervention by the developers and/or administrative staff otherwise customers get incorrectly billed, or other data integrity problems might result. It can also be used in other similar cases when merely logging the exception is not sufficient, and an e-mail alert needs to be sent out.
Another developer who didn't properly understand the concept of exceptions then wrapped some code that could potentially throw this exception in a generic try...catch block which discarded all exceptions. Fortunately, I spotted it, but it could have resulted in serious problems, especially since the "very uncommon" corner case that it was supposed to catch turned out to be a lot more common than I anticipated.
So in general, catching generic exceptions is bad unless you are 100% sure that you know exactly which kinds of exceptions will be thrown and under which circumstances. If in doubt, let them bubble up to the top level exception handler instead.
A similar rule here is never throw exceptions of type System.Exception. You (or another developer) may want to catch your specific exception higher up the call stack while letting others go through.
(There is one point to note, however. In .NET 2.0, if a thread encounters any uncaught exceptions it unloads your whole app domain. So you should wrap the main body of a thread in a generic try...catch block and pass any exceptions caught there to your global exception handling code.)
I would like to play devil's advocate for catching Exception and logging it and rethrowing it. This can be necessary if, for example, you are somewhere in the code and an unexpected exception happens, you can catch it, log meaningful state information that wouldn't be available in a simple stack trace, and then rethrow it to upper layers to deal with.
There are two completely different use cases. The first is the one most people are thinking about, putting a try/catch around some operation that requires a checked exception. This should not be a catch-all by any means.
The second, however, is to stop your program from breaking when it could continue. These cases are:
The top of all threads (By default, exceptions will vanish without a trace!)
Inside a main processing loop that you expect to never exit
Inside a Loop processing a list of objects where one failure shouldn't stop others
Top of the "main" thread--You might control a crash here, like dump a little data to stdout when you run out of memory.
If you have a "Runner" that runs code (for instance, if someone adds a listener to you and you call the listener) then when you run the code you should catch Exception to log the problem and let you continue notifying other listeners.
These cases you ALWAYS want to catch Exception (Maybe even Throwable sometimes) in order to catch programming/unexpected errors, log them and continue.
Unpopular opinion: Not really.
Catch all of the errors you can meaningfully recover from. Sometimes that's all of them.
In my experience, it matters more where the exception came from than which exception is actually thrown. If you keep your exceptions in tight quarters, you won't usually be swallowing anything that would otherwise be useful. Most of the information encoded in the type of an error is ancillary information, so you generally end up effectively catching all of them anyway (but you now have to look up the API docs to get the total set of possible Exceptions).
Keep in mind that some exceptions that should bubble up to the top in almost every case, such as Python's KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit. Fortunately for Python, these are kept in a separate branch of the exception hierarchy, so you can let them bubble up by catching Exception. A well-designed exception hierarchy makes this type of thing really straightforward.
The main time catching general exceptions will cause serious problems is when dealing with resources that need to be cleaned up (perhaps in a finally clause), since a catch-all handler can easily miss that sort of thing. Fortunately this isn't really an issue for languages with defer, constructs like Python's with, or RAII in C++ and Rust.
I think a good guideline is to catch only specific exceptions from within a framework (so that the host application can deal with edge cases like the disk filling up etc), but I don't see why we shouldn't be able to catch all exceptions from our application code. Quite simply there are times where you don't want the app to crash, no matter what might go wrong.
Most of the time catching a general exception is not needed. Of course there are situations where you don't have a choice, but in this case I think it's better to check why you need to catch it. Maybe there's something wrong in your design.
Catching general exception, I feel is like holding a stick of dynamite inside a burning building, and putting out the fuze. It helps for a short while, but dynamite will blow anyways after a while.
Of corse there might be situations where catching a general Exception is necessary, but only for debug purposes. Errors and bugs should be fixed, not hidden.
For my IabManager class, which I used with in-app billing (from the TrivialDrive example online), I noticed sometimes I'd deal with a lot of exceptions. It got to the point where it was unpredictable.
I realized that, as long as I ceased the attempt at trying to consume an in-app product after one exception happens, which is where most of the exceptions would happen (in consume, as opposed to buy), I would be safe.
I just changed all the exceptions to a general exception, and now I don't have to worry about any other random, unpredictable exceptions being thrown.
Before:
catch (final RemoteException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
catch (final IntentSender.SendIntentException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
catch (final IabHelper.IabAsyncInProgressException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
catch (final NullPointerException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
catch (final IllegalStateException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
After:
catch (final Exception exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
It is quite tiresome writing try/catches in every method block.
Apart from AOP, is there any way to avoid this and catch all exceptions? Would it be enough to just catch them at the global error handler level (e.g. as in ASP.NET).
Thanks
The best advice I've heard on the subject (somewhere on SO, actually) was "only catch an exception if you're going to handle it." That is, it only makes sense to use a catch block in that method if that method has the means of handling the exception. For example, if the method should for some reason always return a value, and the exception is either silently logged or somehow indicated in the value (such as an error message attached to some custom DTO or something). There's nothing wrong with bubbling the exception upward in the stack and assuming the caller will handle it.
That's not to say, of course, that it shouldn't be handled at all. As you suggest, the last line of defense should always be the global exception handling for the application. All fails should be handled gracefully, but they should more importantly be handled only by the class/method that is supposed to handle them, which in many cases is not the method from which the exception originated. For example, in a simple forms over data web app, the data access doesn't necessarily need to handle the exception. It can add information to it if pertinent, but for such a simple app the global error handler can take care of logging and presenting an error message.
It should also be noted (I'm assuming you're talking about .NET here) that a try block need not always be accompanied by a catch block. You can try{}finally{} to take care of cleaning up after an exception (such as gracefully closing an external resource) without bothering to catch the exception and instead let it bubble up accordingly.
I agree with David. Here's my basic set of rules, or ... like the pirate code, guidelines ...
There should always be one global exception handler to catch runtimes and anything else that the classes cannot handle.
Try/catch should only be implemented when you can actually do something about the exception. And No, logging the exception is not doing something about it.
Adding a throws or Throwing a Exception or RuntimeException should be avoided. If you have a wide or large number of exceptions to deal with, create a new exception class to wrap them. Exception is too general and creates problems for other developers.
Try/catch blocks are expensive, do don't put them in unless necessary.
Never, and I mean NEVER !!! use try/catch for logic flow.
I've found it helpful to think of your code as having three layers, and using an exception strategy appropriate to each layer. I wrote up the details in Exceptions in the Rainforest.
Why is it a "bad idea" to throw your own exceptions?
found here
In general, it is perfectly fine to throw your own exceptions. Perhaps what you meant to ask was "When is it not necessarily a good idea to throw my own exception?"
One case is when you should be throwing a standard exception. For example, if your method takes a file name and is supposed to return a file, you should probably throw your platform's standard FileNotFoundException rather than throw PeanutPowersFileNotFoundException. If you really want to throw your own exception, you should probably have it extend the standard FileNotFoundException.
Update: Bloch explains this in Item 60 of Effective Java
It's not. You should create and throw custom exceptions whenever you have an exceptional situation.
It isn't provided they are derived from whatever the standard base exception type is (std::exception in c++, or Exception in python, etc...)
If they _aren't_derived from the normal base type, then other people may not catch them when they are expecting to catch all exceptions - which would be a bad thing.
It's not wrong to create your own exception type. However, before going through creating your own, you should check whether your framework already provides an exception that fits.
From the .Net design guidelines:
Consider throwing existing exceptions
residing in the System namespaces
instead of creating custom exception
types.
Do create and throw custom exceptions
if you have an error condition that
can be programmatically handled in a
different way than any other existing
exceptions. Otherwise, throw one of
the existing exceptions.
Do not create and throw new exceptions
just to have your team's exception.
I believe you might be asking why is it a bad idea to re-throw exceptions.
By "rethrow", I mean catching an exception and than generating a new one and throwing it. This can be problematic, as you could end up consuming the original stack trace and loosing all context of the error.
You should not invent your own type of Exception, unless you have something extra you want to add to the Exception type.
If you want to tell the user of your API that they have provided an invalid argument, you should throw an ArgumentException, but if your library fails because of some library specific reason, that you can't convey in a regular exception, you should roll your own and let it contain the info the developer needs.
To continue Peter's response another case when throwing an exception is not a good idea is if you use throwing exceptions to control the business logic of your program.
As long as the exception you are throwing is derived from a proper object, and conveys just that - exceptional situation, throwing an exception is totally acceptable.
Using throwing exceptions to control business logic in addition to being a bad design pattern has also performance implications - throwing and catching exceptions is rather expensive as compared to branching based on the results returned from the method
There's nothing wrong with creating your own exceptions, which can be tailored to convey exactly the information which is appropriate for your situation. A ConfigFileNotFoundException conveys more information than a FileNotFoundException (which file didn't we find?).
But, by all means, make sure that you catch and handle each and every custom exception inside of your code. When the exception flies to some place outside your module (call it package, call it namespace), those folks out there will not even know that it exists, much less what to do with it. Except for a catch (Throwable t) {/* whut? */}.
To me it seems that the question is to catch inexperienced candidates trying to fake experience. There's nothing wrong about throwing your own exceptions in my opinion, and as you can see to everyone else that answered here.
It's not a bad idea at all. If an exceptional situation arises, an exception should be thrown to handle it, especially if you're designing code that others may use, may receive bad input, etc.
It is a bad idea to use exceptions where they're not absolutely necessary, such as situations that are recoverable by normal checks in code or as part of normal execution, since they do have a lot of overhead associated with them. I imagine that's where you may have gotten the idea that they're a bad idea in general. But for what they're meant to do (flagging an exceptional situation that your code isn't equipped to handle), they're absolutely the best tool.
And if you do create custom exceptions for code others might use, do document what they are and what they mean. That way later users of your code will know that they're possible and what they mean if they arise, and can handle them appropriately.
I've seen the following code many times:
try
{
... // some code
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
... // Do something
throw new CustomException(ex);
// or
// throw;
// or
// throw ex;
}
Can you please explain the purpose of re-throwing an exception? Is it following a pattern/best practice in exception handling? (I've read somewhere that it's called "Caller Inform" pattern?)
Rethrowing the same exception is useful if you want to, say, log the exception, but not handle it.
Throwing a new exception that wraps the caught exception is good for abstraction. e.g., your library uses a third-party library that throws an exception that the clients of your library shouldn't know about. In that case, you wrap it into an exception type more native to your library, and throw that instead.
Actually there is a difference between
throw new CustomException(ex);
and
throw;
The second will preserve the stack information.
But sometimes you want to make the Exception more "friendly" to your application domain, instead of letting the DatabaseException reach your GUI, you'll raise your custom exception which contains the original exception.
For instance:
try
{
}
catch (SqlException ex)
{
switch (ex.Number) {
case 17:
case 4060:
case 18456:
throw new InvalidDatabaseConnectionException("The database does not exists or cannot be reached using the supplied connection settings.", ex);
case 547:
throw new CouldNotDeleteException("There is a another object still using this object, therefore it cannot be deleted.", ex);
default:
throw new UnexpectedDatabaseErrorException("There was an unexpected error from the database.", ex);
}
}
Sometimes you want to hide the implementation details of a method or improve
the level of abstraction of a problem so that it’s more meaningful to the caller
of a method. To do this, you can intercept the original exception and substitute
a custom exception that’s better suited for explaining the problem.
Take for example a method that loads the requested user’s details from a text file. The method assumes that a text file exists named with the user’s ID and a suffix of “.data”. When that file doesn’t actually exist, it doesn’t make much sense to throw a FileNotFoundException because the fact that each user’s details are stored in a text file is an implementation detail internal to the method. So this method could instead wrap the original exception in a custom exception with an explanatory message.
Unlike the code you're shown, best practice is that the original exception should be kept by loading it as the InnerException property of your new exception. This means that a developer can still analyze the underlying problem if necessary.
When you're creating a custom exception, here's a useful checklist:
• Find a good name that conveys why the exception was thrown and make sure that the name ends with the word “Exception”.
• Ensure that you implement the three standard exception constructors.
• Ensure that you mark your exception with the Serializable attribute.
• Ensure that you implement the deserialization constructor.
• Add any custom exception properties that might help developers to understand and handle your exception better.
• If you add any custom properties, make sure that you implement and override GetObjectData to serialize your custom properties.
• If you add any custom properties, override the Message property so that you can add your properties to the standard exception message.
• Remember to attach the original exception using the InnerException property of your custom exception.
You typically catch and re-throw for one of two reasons, depending on where the code sits architecturally within an application.
At the core of an application you typically catch and re-throw to translate an exception into something more meaningful. For example if you're writing a data access layer and using custom error codes with SQL Server, you might translate SqlException into things like ObjectNotFoundException. This is useful because (a) it makes it easier for callers to handle specific types of exception, and (b) because it prevents implementation details of that layer such as the fact you're using SQL Server for persistence leaking into other layers, which allows you to change things in the future more easily.
At boundaries of applications it's common to catch and re-throw without translating an exception so that you can log details of it, aiding in debugging and diagnosing live issues. Ideally you want to publish error somewhere that the operations team can easily monitor (e.g. the event log) as well as somewhere that gives context around where the exception happened in the control flow for developers (typically tracing).
I can think of the following reasons:
Keeping the set of thrown exception types fixed, as part of the API, so that the callers only have to worry about the fixed set of exceptions. In Java, you are practically forced to do that, because of the checked exceptions mechanism.
Adding some context information to the exception. For example, instead of letting the bare "record not found" pass through from the DB, you might want to catch it and add "... while processing order no XXX, looking for product YYY".
Doing some cleanup - closing files, rolling back transactions, freeing some handles.
Generally the "Do Something" either involves better explaining the exception (For instance, wrapping it in another exception), or tracing information through a certain source.
Another possibility is if the exception type is not enough information to know if an exception needs to be caught, in which case catching it an examining it will provide more information.
This is not to say that method is used for purely good reasons, many times it is used when a developer thinks tracing information may be needed at some future point, in which case you get try {} catch {throw;} style, which is not helpful at all.
I think it depends on what you are trying to do with the exception.
One good reason would be to log the error first in the catch, and then throw it up to the UI to generate a friendly error message with the option to see a more "advanced/detailed" view of the error, which contains the original error.
Another approach is a "retry" approach, e.g., an error count is kept, and after a certain amount of retries that's the only time the error is sent up the stack (this is sometimes done for database access for database calls that timeout, or in accessing web services over slow networks).
There will be a bunch of other reasons to do it though.
FYI, this is a related question about each type of re-throw:
Performance Considerations for throwing Exceptions
My question focuses on "Why" we re-throw exceptions and its usage in application exception handling strategy.
Until I started using the EntLib ExceptionBlock, I was using them to log errors before throwing them. Kind of nasty when you think I could have handled them at that point, but at the time it was better to have them fail nastily in UAT (after logging them) rather than cover a flow-on bug.
The application will most probably be catching those re-thrown exceptions higher up the call stack and so re-throwing them allows that higher up handler to intercept and process them as appropriate. It is quite common for application to have a top-level exception handler that logs or reports the expections.
Another alternative is that the coder was lazy and instead of catching just the set of exceptions they want to handle they have caught everything and then re-thrown only the ones they cannot actually handle.
As Rafal mentioned, sometimes this is done to convert a checked exception to an unchecked exception, or to a checked exception that's more suitable for an API. There is an example here:
http://radio-weblogs.com/0122027/stories/2003/04/01/JavasCheckedExceptionsWereAMistake.html
If you look at exceptions as on an alternative way to get a method result, then re-throwing an exception is like wrapping your result into some other object.
And this is a common operation in a non-exceptional world. Usually this happens on a border of two application layers - when a function from layer B calls a function from layer C, it transforms C's result into B's internal form.
A -- calls --> B -- calls --> C
If it doesn't, then at the layer A which calls the layer B there will be a full set of JDK exceptions to handle. :-)
As also the accepted answer points out, layer A might not even be aware of C's exception.
Example
Layer A, servlet: retrieves an image and it's meta information
Layer B, JPEG library: collects available DCIM tags to parse a JPEG file
Layer C, a simple DB: a class reading string records from a random access file. Some bytes are broken, so it throws an exception saying "can't read UTF-8 string for record 'bibliographicCitation'".
So A won't understand the meaning of 'bibliographicCitation'. So B should translate this exception for A into TagsReadingException which wraps the original.
THE MAIN REASON of re-throwing exceptions is to leave Call Stack untouched, so you can get more complete picture of what happens and calls sequence.
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.
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.
Unless you are doing some logging and clean up code in the front end of your application, then I think it is bad to catch all exceptions.
My basic rule of thumb is to catch all the exceptions you expect and anything else is a bug.
If you catch everything and continue on, it's a bit like putting a sticking plaster over the warning light on your car dashboard. You can't see it anymore, but it doesn't mean everything is ok.
Yes! (except at the "top" of your application)
By catching an exception and allowing the code execution to continue, you are stating that you know how do deal with and circumvent, or fix a particular problem. You are stating that this is a recoverable situation. Catching Exception or SystemException means that you will catch problems like IO errors, network errors, out-of-memory errors, missing-code errors, null-pointer-dereferencing and the likes. It is a lie to say that you can deal with these.
In a well organised application, these unrecoverable problems should be handled high up the stack.
In addition, as code evolves, you don't want your function to catch a new exception that is added in the future to a called method.
In my opinion you should catch all exceptions you expect, but this rule applies to anything but your interface logic. All the way down the call stack you should probably create a way to catch all exceptions, do some logging/give user feedback and, if needed and possible, shut down gracefully.
Nothing is worse than an application crashing with some user unfriendly stacktrace dumped to the screen. Not only does it give (perhaps unwanted) insight into your code, but it also confuses your end-user, and sometimes even scares them away to a competing application.
There's been a lot of philosophical discussions (more like arguments) about this issue. Personally, I believe the worst thing you can do is swallow exceptions. The next worst is allowing an exception to bubble up to the surface where the user gets a nasty screen full of technical mumbo-jumbo.
Well, I don't see any difference between catching a general exception or a specific one, except that when having multiple catch blocks, you can react differently depending on what the exception is.
In conclusion, you will catch both IOException and NullPointerException with a generic Exception, but the way your program should react is probably different.
The point is twofold I think.
Firstly, if you don't know what exception has occurred how can you hope to recover from it. If you expect that a user might type a filename in wrong then you can expect a FileNotFoundException and tell the user to try again. If that same code generated a NullReferenceException and you simply told the user to try again they wouldn't know what had happened.
Secondly, the FxCop guidelines do focus on Library/Framework code - not all their rules are designed to be applicable to EXE's or ASP.Net web sites. So having a global exception handler that will log all exceptions and exit the application nicely is a good thing to have.
The problem with catching all exceptions is that you may be catching ones that you don't expect, or indeed ones that you should not be catching. The fact is that an exception of any kind indicates that something has gone wrong, and you have to sort it out before continuing otherwise you may end up with data integrity problems and other bugs that are not so easy to track down.
To give one example, in one project I implemented an exception type called CriticalException. This indicates an error condition that requires intervention by the developers and/or administrative staff otherwise customers get incorrectly billed, or other data integrity problems might result. It can also be used in other similar cases when merely logging the exception is not sufficient, and an e-mail alert needs to be sent out.
Another developer who didn't properly understand the concept of exceptions then wrapped some code that could potentially throw this exception in a generic try...catch block which discarded all exceptions. Fortunately, I spotted it, but it could have resulted in serious problems, especially since the "very uncommon" corner case that it was supposed to catch turned out to be a lot more common than I anticipated.
So in general, catching generic exceptions is bad unless you are 100% sure that you know exactly which kinds of exceptions will be thrown and under which circumstances. If in doubt, let them bubble up to the top level exception handler instead.
A similar rule here is never throw exceptions of type System.Exception. You (or another developer) may want to catch your specific exception higher up the call stack while letting others go through.
(There is one point to note, however. In .NET 2.0, if a thread encounters any uncaught exceptions it unloads your whole app domain. So you should wrap the main body of a thread in a generic try...catch block and pass any exceptions caught there to your global exception handling code.)
I would like to play devil's advocate for catching Exception and logging it and rethrowing it. This can be necessary if, for example, you are somewhere in the code and an unexpected exception happens, you can catch it, log meaningful state information that wouldn't be available in a simple stack trace, and then rethrow it to upper layers to deal with.
There are two completely different use cases. The first is the one most people are thinking about, putting a try/catch around some operation that requires a checked exception. This should not be a catch-all by any means.
The second, however, is to stop your program from breaking when it could continue. These cases are:
The top of all threads (By default, exceptions will vanish without a trace!)
Inside a main processing loop that you expect to never exit
Inside a Loop processing a list of objects where one failure shouldn't stop others
Top of the "main" thread--You might control a crash here, like dump a little data to stdout when you run out of memory.
If you have a "Runner" that runs code (for instance, if someone adds a listener to you and you call the listener) then when you run the code you should catch Exception to log the problem and let you continue notifying other listeners.
These cases you ALWAYS want to catch Exception (Maybe even Throwable sometimes) in order to catch programming/unexpected errors, log them and continue.
Unpopular opinion: Not really.
Catch all of the errors you can meaningfully recover from. Sometimes that's all of them.
In my experience, it matters more where the exception came from than which exception is actually thrown. If you keep your exceptions in tight quarters, you won't usually be swallowing anything that would otherwise be useful. Most of the information encoded in the type of an error is ancillary information, so you generally end up effectively catching all of them anyway (but you now have to look up the API docs to get the total set of possible Exceptions).
Keep in mind that some exceptions that should bubble up to the top in almost every case, such as Python's KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit. Fortunately for Python, these are kept in a separate branch of the exception hierarchy, so you can let them bubble up by catching Exception. A well-designed exception hierarchy makes this type of thing really straightforward.
The main time catching general exceptions will cause serious problems is when dealing with resources that need to be cleaned up (perhaps in a finally clause), since a catch-all handler can easily miss that sort of thing. Fortunately this isn't really an issue for languages with defer, constructs like Python's with, or RAII in C++ and Rust.
I think a good guideline is to catch only specific exceptions from within a framework (so that the host application can deal with edge cases like the disk filling up etc), but I don't see why we shouldn't be able to catch all exceptions from our application code. Quite simply there are times where you don't want the app to crash, no matter what might go wrong.
Most of the time catching a general exception is not needed. Of course there are situations where you don't have a choice, but in this case I think it's better to check why you need to catch it. Maybe there's something wrong in your design.
Catching general exception, I feel is like holding a stick of dynamite inside a burning building, and putting out the fuze. It helps for a short while, but dynamite will blow anyways after a while.
Of corse there might be situations where catching a general Exception is necessary, but only for debug purposes. Errors and bugs should be fixed, not hidden.
For my IabManager class, which I used with in-app billing (from the TrivialDrive example online), I noticed sometimes I'd deal with a lot of exceptions. It got to the point where it was unpredictable.
I realized that, as long as I ceased the attempt at trying to consume an in-app product after one exception happens, which is where most of the exceptions would happen (in consume, as opposed to buy), I would be safe.
I just changed all the exceptions to a general exception, and now I don't have to worry about any other random, unpredictable exceptions being thrown.
Before:
catch (final RemoteException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
catch (final IntentSender.SendIntentException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
catch (final IabHelper.IabAsyncInProgressException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
catch (final NullPointerException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
catch (final IllegalStateException exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}
After:
catch (final Exception exc)
{
exc.printStackTrace();
}