Question

I wrote this little helper method to search the exception chain for a particular exception (either equals or super class). However, this seems like a solution to a common problem, so was thinking it must already exist somewhere, possibly in a library I have already imported. So, any ideas on if/where this might exist?

boolean exceptionSearch(Exception base, Class<?> search) {

    Throwable e = base;

    do {
        if (search.isAssignableFrom(e.getClass())) {
            return true;
        }
    } while ((e = e.getCause()) != null);

    return false;
}

Answer 1

Take a look into Google Guava project. They have quite a few handy classes including one for exceptions. Eg, functionality you’ve just requested could be implemented in the next way:

    boolean exceptionSearch(Exception base, Class<?> search) {
        return Throwables.getCausalChain(base).contains(search);
    }

Source code for this class: Throwables

Enjoy!