throws Exception in finally blocks

Question

Is there an elegant way to handle exceptions that are thrown in the a finally block?

For example:

try {
  // Use the resource.
}
catch( Exception ex ) {
  // Problem with the resource.
}
finally {
   try{
     resource.close();
   }
   catch( Exception ex ) {
     // Could not close the resource?
   }
}

How do you avoid the try/catch in the finally block?

Answer 1

One solution, if the two Exceptions are two different classes

try {
    ...
    }
catch(package1.Exception err)
   {
    ...
   }
catch(package2.Exception err)
   {
   ...
   }
finally
  {
  }

But sometimes you cannot avoid this second try-catch. e.g. for closing a stream

InputStream in=null;
try
 {
 in= new FileInputStream("File.txt");
 (..)// do something that might throw an exception during the analysis of the file, e.g. a SQL error
 }
catch(SQLException err)
 {
 //handle exception
 }
finally
 {
 //at the end, we close the file
 if(in!=null) try { in.close();} catch(IOException err) { /* ignore */ }
 }

Answer 2

If you can you should test to avoid the error condition to begin with.

try{...}
catch(NullArgumentException nae){...}
finally
{
  //or if resource had some useful function that tells you its open use that
  if (resource != null) 
  {
      resource.Close();
      resource = null;//just to be explicit about it was closed
  }
}

Also you should probably only be catching exceptions that you can recover from, if you can't recover then let it propagate to the top level of your program. If you can't test for an error condition that you will have to surround your code with a try catch block like you already have done (although I would recommend still catching specific, expected errors).

Answer 3

Why do you want to avoid the additional block? Since the finally block contains "normal" operations which may throw an exception AND you want the finally block to run completely you HAVE to catch exceptions.

If you don't expect the finally block to throw an exception and you don't know how to handle the exception anyway (you would just dump stack trace) let the exception bubble up the call stack (remove the try-catch from the finally block).

If you want to reduce typing you could implement a "global" outer try-catch block, which will catch all exceptions thrown in finally blocks:

try {
    try {
        ...
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        ...
    } finally {
        ...
    }

    try {
        ...
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        ...
    } finally {
        ...
    }

    try {
        ...
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        ...
    } finally {
        ...
    }
} catch (Exception ex) {
    ...
}

Answer 4

You could refactor this into another method ...

public void RealDoSuff()
{
   try
   { DoStuff(); }
   catch
   { // resource.close failed or something really weird is going on 
     // like an OutOfMemoryException 
   }
}

private void DoStuff() 
{
  try 
  {}
  catch
  {
  }
  finally 
  {
    if (resource != null) 
    {
      resource.close(); 
    }
  }
}

Answer 5

I usually do it like this:

try {
  // Use the resource.
} catch( Exception ex ) {
  // Problem with the resource.
} finally {
  // Put away the resource.
  closeQuietly( resource );
}

Elsewhere:

protected void closeQuietly( Resource resource ) {
  try {
    if (resource != null) {
      resource.close();
    }
  } catch( Exception ex ) {
    log( "Exception during Resource.close()", ex );
  }
}

Answer 6

I usually do this:

MyResource r = null;
try { 
   // use resource
} finally {   
    if( r != null ) try { 
        r.close(); 
    } catch( ThatSpecificExceptionOnClose teoc ){}
}

Rationale: If I'm done with the resource and the only problem I have is closing it, there is not much I can do about it. It doesn't make sense either to kill the whole thread if I'm done with the resource anyway.

This is one of the cases when at least for me, it is safe to ignore that checked exception.

To this day I haven't had any problem using this idiom.

Answer 7

I typically use one of the closeQuietly methods in org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils:

public static void closeQuietly(OutputStream output) {
    try {
        if (output != null) {
            output.close();
        }
    } catch (IOException ioe) {
        // ignore
    }
}

Answer 8

try {
    final Resource resource = acquire();
    try {
        use(resource);
    } finally {
        resource.release();
    }
} catch (ResourceException exx) {
    ... sensible code ...
}

Job done. No null tests. Single catch, include acquire and release exceptions. Of course you can use the Execute Around idiom and only have to write it once for each resource type.