Question

I have a class with two constructors – one accepts a Date object and the other attempts to create a date object based upon a given timestamp string. The caveat of this is that the conversion to a Date object can throw an exception. I’m getting the ‘variable timestamp might not have been initialized’ error.

First constructor:

public Visit(Date timestamp) {
    this.timestamp = timestamp;
}

Second constructor (the one that produces the error):

public Visit(String timestamp) {
    try {
        this.timestamp = dateFormat.parse(timestamp);
    } catch (ParseException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(Visit.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
    }
}

I’ve tried adding the initialization of this.timestamp to the finally statement of the try but this then gives an error that the variable may already have been initialized.

Answer 1

If you are happy to use a default value when there is an exception, you can do something like:

Date temp = null;
try {
    temp = dateFormat.parse(timestamp);
} catch (ParseException ex) {
    Logger.getLogger(Visit.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
}

this.timestamp = (temp == null ? <some default Date value> : temp);

If not, then you could throw an exception from your constructor. Typically, if the argument of your constructor is not valid, you could rethrow an IllegalArgumentException for example.