How to Throw Exceptions in Java

Adam E.

—October 21, 2022

The Problem

In Java, you might want to explicitly throw an exception when you know your program has reached some state that would prevent it from continuing to execute successfully.

The Solution

To throw an exception, we need to specify the keyword throws along with the exception type and any additional arguments the relevant exception constructor will accept. For example, to throw a generic exception we can use the Exception class as shown below:

public class Main {
    
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        try {
            int x = 1 / 0;
        } catch (Exception exception) {
            throw new Exception("Something went wrong!");
        }
    }
}

This will yield the following output:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.Exception: Something went wrong!
    at Main.main(Main.java:7)

Extending the Exception Class

The Exception thrown above can be a bit limiting as the information provided by the exception is rather sparse. We could provide a more detailed exception message to the Exception constructor and pass in the underlying caught exception. But there might be cases where we need more scope for custom exception attributes that are not available by using the Exception class. Additionally, we might want to define exceptions that represent business processes not covered by the standard Java subclasses of Exception (such as ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, ArithmeticException, and IllegalArgumentException). We can create our own exceptions by extending the Exception class.

Let’s say your code interfaces with some driver or third-party code. Should that third-party code experience an error, it may yield some error code. We can create a custom exception class that facilitates passing in an error code as enum, and use this error code to perform additional actions in our application if required.

public class CustomException extends Exception {

    private final ErrorCode errorCode;

    public CustomException(String message, ErrorCode errorCode) {
        super(message);
        this.errorCode = errorCode;
    }

    public CustomException(String message, ErrorCode errorCode, Throwable cause) {
        super(message, cause);
        this.errorCode = errorCode;
    }

    public ErrorCode getCode() {
        return this.errorCode;
    }

    public String toString() {
        return super.getMessage() + " Error code: " + getCode();
    }

    enum ErrorCode {
        BAD_THINGS
    }
}

We can now throw our CustomException:

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws CustomException {
        try {
            int x = 1 / 0;
        } catch (Exception exception) {
            throw new CustomException("Something bad!", CustomException.ErrorCode.BAD_THINGS, exception);
        }
    }
}

The output of this program yields:

Exception in thread "main" Something bad! Error code: BAD_THINGS
    at Main.main(Main.java:7)
Caused by: java.lang.ArithmeticException: / by zero
    at Main.main(Main.java:5)

Creating custom exceptions can be helpful, but there are some general best practices to remember when deciding to implement a custom exception class:

• Ensure that the custom exception class provides some benefit over the existing JDK-provided exceptions. The JDK provides standard exceptions, such as UnsupportedOperationException (which can be used to indicate that a request operation is not supported) and IllegalArgumentException (which can indicate that illegal arguments have been passed to a method). These are just two of many built-in classes that extend Exception.
• Ensure that you have a constructor that sets the underlying throwable cause. Should your program catch a standard exception, your custom exception should not swallow this important information.
• Follow the exception naming convention, which is that all exception class names should be suffixed with Exception.