Java Global Exception Handling

MikeGrace — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:56:56 +0000

It’s been a while since I have worked with Java and it’s time for me to brush up so I have decided to do 30 days of Java. I will be attempting to learn something new or explain something about Java each day.

In many of my projects I use a remote error collecting service called ErrorStack. Love it! My apps throw errors over the internet to it and it generates report and has a myriad of ways to alert me. I do my best to write code that doesn’t have errors and handles errors and exception gracefully but it still happens. This is where the Java 1.5 setDefaultUncaughtExceptionHandler comes in to play.

I wrote some quick code to test out the feature

package org.michaelgrace.sandbox;
 
public class GlobalErrorHandling {
 
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Handler handler = new Handler();
    Thread.setDefaultUncaughtExceptionHandler(handler);
 
    throw new RuntimeException("party on error!");
  }
}
 
class Handler implements Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler {
  public void uncaughtException(Thread t, Throwable e) {
    System.out.println("Where did that error come from?!");
    System.out.println("This is where I would report the error to ErrorStack");
    System.out.println(e.getMessage());
    System.out.println(t.toString());
  }
}

I exported the class to a jar using Eclipse and ran it from the command line

mgrace$ java -jar global-error-test.jar 
Where did that error come from?!
This is where I would report the error to ErrorStack
party on error!
Thread[main,5,main]

It worked!

I plan on building a class for making it easy to report errors to ErrorStack and will release it to the world when I do.

Resources: http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2006/06/13/java-5-global-exception-handling/

Michael Grace » Java

Java Global Exception Handling