Globally Log Catch Exception e

Question

Suppose that I have a legacy java application with thousands of lines of code which do:

try {
   // stuff 
} catch (Exception e) {
   // eat the exception
}

Is there any global option that I could flip or 3rd party JAR which would log all "eaten" exceptions? I know that I could do a massive find replace (search for catch (Exception e) { and replace it with catch(Exception e) { logException(e);) but I was wondering if there was a better solution. Thanks!

Answer 1

No. If the code catches the exception and does nothing with it, then there's nothing you can do to change that without changing the code.

A find-replace should work. However, I would also strongly recommend checking it with FindBugs afterward to make sure that you found all instances of this problem. (FindBugs should be a part of your process anyway, but I'm just pointing it out in case anyone who reads this doesn't already use it.)

Answer 2

You could perhaps provide your own implementation of Exception which logs the stack-trace in the constructor. From the man page of java:

-Xbootclasspath:bootclasspath
Specify a colon-separated list of directories, JAR archives, and ZIP archives to search for boot class files. These are used in place of the boot class files included in the Java 2 SDK.

Answer 3

This will allow you to handle any uncaught exceptions:

Thread.setDefaultUncaughtExceptionHandler(
  new Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler(){
    public void uncaughtException(Thread t, Throwable e) {
      //handle the exception
    }
});

Answer 4

Seems like a place where Aspect Oriented Programming could come in handy. You could set up an exception handler pointcut. Check out AspectJ for a nice AOP implementation.