Question

I am using JDBC, and am running a query. Is there a way to get the reason it failed from the SQLException object returned?

In particular, I want to know if my query violated a foreign key constraint (and which one), or a key constraint.

Would this result be vendor-specific? Just in case, I am using the postgresql-8.4-701.jdbc4.jar driver. If it is vendor-specific, where would I find the codes?

EDIT: I want to do this dynamically – i.e.

if(violated foreign key constraint on attribute x) {
     return 5;
} else if (violated primary key constraint) {
     return 7;
} else {
     return 0;
}

Or something like that.

EDIT: According to this post, there are no vendor-specific error codes for PostgreSQL JDBC. Dunno if that’s still valid.

Answer 1

You can process the error code from the SQLException object.

sqlException.getErrorCode()

This retrieves the vendor-specific exception code for this SQLException object. By using the vendor-specific error code, you can branch to the required block of code.