Question

I have a for loop I’m using to iterate through an arraylist, and once I find the object I need I want to set a previously obtained object in a set method for this object, set a flag for ‘not found’ to false and then break out of the loop. After that I want to throw an exception if the not found flag is still true, otherwise just come to the end of the method.

I think I’m either misusing the break or the for loop. I am constantly getting the exception thrown.

Note, ‘items’ is the arraylist of LibraryItems.

        for(LibraryItem l : items) {
        if(l.equals(item)) {
            l.setCheckedOut(patronToRetrieve);
            itemNotFound = false;
            break;
        } else {
            itemNotFound = true;
        }
    }
        if (itemNotFound = true) {
            throw new CheckInOutException("The item " + item.getTitle() + " does not exist in the catalogue. Sorry, " + patronToRetrieve.getName() + ", you will not be able to check this out at this time.");
        } else {

        }

Answer 1

One issue I could see is:

if (itemNotFound = true) {
            throw new CheckInOutException("The item " + item.getTitle() + " does not exist in the catalogue. Sorry, " + patronToRetrieve.getName() + ", you will not be able to check this out at this time.");
        } 

Above statement always results in true, because you are assigning true to itemNotFound in if clause.

should be:

if (itemNotFound) {
            throw new CheckInOutException("The item " + item.getTitle() + " does not exist in the catalogue. Sorry, " + patronToRetrieve.getName() + ", you will not be able to check this out at this time.");
        } 

(or)

 if (itemNotFound == true) {
                throw new CheckInOutException("The item " + item.getTitle() + " does not exist in the catalogue. Sorry, " + patronToRetrieve.getName() + ", you will not be able to check this out at this time.");
            } 

== is eqaulity check, = is assignment.