Question

I’m using Android’s httpclient to connect to a domain as follows:

try {
            URL url = new URL("example.com");
            HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
            read(conn.getInputStream());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

Now is it fine if I remove this line:

e.printStackTrace();

And replace it with this:

Toast toast = Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "Could not connect to domain.", Toast.LENGTH_LONG);
toast.show();

Or do I have to do something with the ‘e’ variable? In which case it’ll be:

catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
    Toast toast = Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "Could not connect to domain.", Toast.LENGTH_LONG);
    toast.show();
        }

And if I do e.printStackTrace(), where does it print to?

Answer 1

I’d recommend catching only the thrown exception type (I think IOException in this case). Other exceptions may be for completely unrelated problems.

Yes, it’s fine to replace the printStackTrace with the toast. Bonus tip: Just call

Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "Could not connect to domain.", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

and you can do it all in one line. 🙂

e.printStackTrace() will print to the standard logcat trace, which you can view with the adb logcat command (adb is part of the Android SDK).