Question

I’d like to use to a custom exception to have a user-friendly message come up when an exception of any sort takes place.

What’s a good straightforward way of doing this? Are there any extra precautions I should take to avoid interfering with Swing’s EDT?

Answer 1

Exception Translation:

It’s a good idea to not pollute your application with messages that have no meaning to the end user, but instead create meaningful Exceptions and messages that will translate the exception/error that happened somewhere deep in the implementation of your app.

As per @Romain’s comment, you can use Exception(Throwable cause) constructor to keep track of the lower level exception.

From Effective Java 2nd Edition, Item 61:

[…] higher layers should catch
lower-level exceptions and, in their
place, throw exceptions that can be
explained in terms of the higher-level
abstraction. This idiom is known as
exception translation:

   // Exception Translation
    try {
         // Use lower-level abstraction to do our bidding
         ...
    } catch(LowerLevelException e) {
         throw new HigherLevelException(...);
    }