Question

I’m returning to Java (Android) after a long time away in C# .NET -land, and trying to remember the various idiosyncrasies.

One that’s got me stuck is this; I’m throwing an Exception in my constructor if my class fails to initialise properly, as follows:

    // Constructor
    public CountdownDictionary(JSONArray jsValues, ArrayList<String> returnFieldList)
{
    this.DictionaryType = getDictionaryTypeFromValues(jsValues);
    if (this.DictionaryType == CountdownDictionaryTypes.Unknown)
    {
        throw new Exception("Unknown dictionary type");
    }
}

Eclipse give a compile-time error

Unhandled exception type Exception

This is confusing me; since how can I handle the exception? I don’t want to handle the Exception in this class, I want it to be unhandled so that it bubbles up to the caller and they can handle it!

What am I missing?

Answer 1

You are throwing an exception inside constructor, but didn’t specify throws clause in method signature, which is compile time error, that is why eclipse complaining. Following code snippet will resolve the issue.

 public CountdownDictionary(JSONArray jsValues, ArrayList<String> returnFieldList) throws Exception