Question

I currently am working on a project that does a lot of work with Database.

One core idiom that I have reused many, many times in my code is the following.

My question is, is there a better way to handle the exceptions at each step of the getTransformedResults method? Is this a proper way of handling the SQLExceptions, or is there a better, more concise way of doing this?

Thanks for your input!

public ResultType handleResultSet(ResultSet rs);

public ResultType getTransformedResults(String query) throws SQLException {
  ResultType resultObj = new ResultType();

  Connection connection = null;
  try { 
    connection = dataSource.getConnection();
  } catch (SQLException sqle) {
    // cleanup 
    throw sqle;
  }

  Statement stmt = null;
  try { 
    stmt = connection.createStatement();
  } catch (SQLException sqle) {
    try { connection.close() } catch (SQLException dontCare) {}
    // cleanup
    throw sqle;
  }

  ResultSet rs = null;
  try { 
    ResultSet rs = stmtm.executeQuery(query);
    resultObj = handleResultSet(rs);
  } catch (SQLException sqle) {
    // cleanup
    throw sqle;
  } finally {
    if (rs != null) try { rs.close() } catch (SQLException dontCare) {}
    try { stmt.close() } catch (SQLException dontCare) {}
    try { connection.close() } catch (SQLException dontCare) {}
  }

  return resultObj;
}

Answer 1

You may be interested in using Apache Commons DbUtils which is aimed exactly at such purposes.

It has some drawbacks when trying to use more sophisticated JDBC but for regular usage it should be more than enough.

Besides that, your code contains too much try/catch blocks and can be simplified to something like the following:

public interface ResultSetHandler<ResultType> {
     ResultType handleResultSet(ResultSet rs);
}

public <ResultType> ResultType getTransformedResults(String query, ResultSetHandler<ResultType> rsh) throws SQLException {      
  Connection connection = null;
  Statement stmt = null;

  try { 
    connection = dataSource.getConnection();
    stmt = connection.createStatement();
    ResultSet rs = stmtm.executeQuery(query);
    return rsh.handleResultSet(rs);
  } catch (SQLException sqle) {
    // cleanup 
    throw sqle;
  } finally {
    if(stmt != null) {
      statement.close(); // closes also resultSet
      connection.close();
    }
  }
}

Though Apache Commons DbUtils library does exactly the same under the hood.