Question

I am running into an extremely strange behavior in Groovy. When I throw an exception from a closure in a Script, the end exception that was thrown was different.

Here are the code and the details:

public class TestDelegate {

    def method(Closure closure) {
        closure.setResolveStrategy(Closure.DELEGATE_FIRST);
        closure.delegate = this;
        closure.call();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Make Script from File
        File dslFile = new File("src/Script.dsl");
        GroovyShell shell = new GroovyShell();
        Script dslScript = shell.parse(dslFile);

        TestDelegate myDelegate = new TestDelegate();

        dslScript.metaClass.methodMissing = {
            // will run method(closure)
            String name, arguments ->
            myDelegate.invokeMethod(name, arguments);
        }

        dslScript.metaClass.propertyMissing = {
            String name ->

            println "Will throw error now!"
            throw new MyOwnException("errrrror");
        }

        dslScript.run();
    }
}

class MyOwnException extends Exception {
    public MyOwnException(String message) {
        super(message);
    }
}

Script.dsl:

method {
    println a;
}

So the plan is that when I run the main() method in TestDelegate, it will run the DSL script, which calls for the method method(). Not finding it in the script, it will invoke methodMissing, which then invokes method() from myDelegate, which in turns invoke the closure, setting the delegate to the testDelegate. So far, so good. Then the closure is supposed to try printing out “a”, which is not defined and will thus set off propertyMissing, which will will throw MyOwnException.

When I run the code, however, I get the following output:

Will throw error now!
Exception in thread "main" groovy.lang.MissingPropertyException: No such property: a for class: TestDelegate

Now, it must have reached that catch block, since it printed “Will throw error now!” It must have thrown MyOwnException too! But somewhere along the lines, MyOwnException was converted to MissingPropertyException, and I have no idea why. Does anyone have any idea?

P.S. if I remove closure.setResolveStrategy(Closure.DELEGATE_FIRST) from TestDelegate#method(), the code acts as expected and throws MyOwnException. But I really need the setResolveStrategy(Closure.DELEGATE_FIRST) for my DSL project. And I would prefer to know the root cause of this rather than just removing a line or two and see that it works without understanding why.

Answer 1

I think this is what essentially happens: With a delegate-first resolve strategy, the Groovy runtime first tries to access property a on myDelegate, which results in a MissingPropertyException because no such property exists. Then it tries propertyMissing, which causes a MyOwnException to be thrown. Eventually the runtime gives up and rethrows the first exception encountered (a design decision), which happens to be the MissingPropertyException.

With an owner-first resolve strategy, propertyMissing is consulted first, and hence MyOwnException is eventually rethrown.

Looking at the stack trace and source code underneath should provide more evidence.