Question

We’re trying to implement some sort of Chess game and we have defined an abstract class Piece with constructor:

public Piece(String name) throws EmptyStringException{
    if(name.length()<=0)
        throw new EmptyStringException();
    pieceName = name;
}

And an extending class could look like this:

public King(boolean white) throws EmptyStringException{         
    super("King", white);        
}

The ‘problem’ here is, if i want to create a new King piece i have to write:

try {
    Piece king = new King(true);
} catch(EmptyStringException e){
    e.printStackTrace();
}

instead of the much simpler:

Piece king = new King(true);

So even though i simply can’t create an EmptyStringException, i still have to try/catch the exception.

How can i solve this so i can still throw the EmptyStringException in Piece, but don’t have to try/catch every time i need to create a new chesspiece ?

Answer 1

Use runtime exception:

public class EmptyStringException extends RuntimeException

instead of plain Exception. You can still document your exception in method declaration, but you are not forcing client code to deal with the exception.