Question

So we are a few guys developing this product that is communicating with a really unstable server. It often returns very strange and corrupt data. During testing we want the resulting crashes to be loud, so we discover them. But every other day we need to demonstrate our product for a potential customer. To the customer the errors will go undiscovered if we just swallow them. I am thinking about implementing something like this around all server communication to quickly switch between swallowing exceptions and crashing:

try {
    apiCall();
} catch (Exception e) {
    if(!SWALLOW_EXCEPTION) {
        throw e;
    }
}

Is this an awesome idea, or can it be done in a better way?

Answer 1

I would recommend using a Logger like SLF4J, java.util.logging or Log4j. Any log messages that are ‘debugging’ but you still want tracked you can put to the DEBUG, INFO or WARN levels based on their severities. Real errors you can save for the ‘Error’ level.

When you do demos to customers, set your log level to Error so they don’t see everything. When you are running normally though, set it to a level to capture the logging level you need.

Swallowing exceptions is never a good practice. By using a logger, you can hide them if it is giving you too much detail. You can always get access to them if you need without recompiling.