Question

I have a final member data:

public final Foo foo;

in the constructor, foo is initialized as follow:

foo = new Foo();

Now, unfortunately, Foo’s constructor might throw an exception:

try {
    foo = new Foo();
} catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

But now compiler complains that foo might not be initialized, which is true if Foo’s constructor throws an exception. But if I put foo = null inside the catch braces, it complains that foo might have been initialized.

Foo is a third-party library that I cannot modify.

So, what’s the most graceful way of handling this?

Answer 1

foo = createFoo();

...


private static Foo createFoo() {
    try {
        return new Foo();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return null;
    }
}

I make no comment about whether it makes sense to continue with construction of your outer object if the inner object’s constructor has failed…