How to throw an Exception when your method signature doesn't allow to throw Exception?

Question

I have a method like this:

public void getSomething(){
...
}

I want to throw an Exception inside getSomething(). The compiler will not allow me to do that because my method doesn't allow Exception to be thrown in there. But I need to throw a subclass of Exception for my testing (I can't throw Unchecked Exception). This is clearly a hack but I need it for my testing. I tried EasyMock but it doesn't allow me to do that either. Any ideas how to do that?

Thanks, Sean Nguyen

Answer 1

Method 1:

This post by Alexey Ragozin describes how to use a generics trick to throw an undeclared checked exception. From that post:

public class AnyThrow {

    public static void throwUnchecked(Throwable e) {
        AnyThrow.<RuntimeException>throwAny(e);
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    private static <E extends Throwable> void throwAny(Throwable e) throws E {
        throw (E)e;
    }
}

The trick relies on throwUnchecked "lying" to the compiler that the type E is RuntimeException with its call to throwAny. Since throwAny is declared as throws E, the compiler thinks that particular call can just throw RuntimeException. Of course, the trick is made possible by throwAny arbitrarily declaring E and blindly casting to it, allowing the caller to decide what its argument is cast to - terrible design when coding sanely. At runtime, E is erased and has no meaning.

As you noted, doing such a thing is a huge hack and you should document its use very well.

---

Method 2:

You can also use sun.misc.Unsafe to this end. First you must implement a method that uses reflection to return that class's instance:

private static Unsafe getUnsafe() {
    try {
        Field theUnsafeField = Unsafe.class.getDeclaredField("theUnsafe");
        theUnsafeField.setAccessible(true);
        return (Unsafe)theUnsafeField.get(null);
    }
    catch (NoSuchFieldException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
    catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
}

This is necessary as calling Unsafe.getUnsafe() will typically throw a SecurityException. Once you have the instance of Unsafe you can put its terrifying capabilities to use:

Unsafe unsafe = getUnsafe();
unsafe.throwException(new Exception());

Credit goes to this answer on the post https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5574241/interesting-uses-of-sun-misc-unsafe. I thought I'd mention this for completeness but it's probably better just to use the trick above instead of allowing Unsafe into your code.

---

Method 3:

In the comments of the linked answer about using Unsafe, @bestsss points out a much simpler trick using the deprecated method Thread.stop(Throwable):

Thread.currentThread().stop(new Exception());

In this case you would use @SuppressWarnings("deprecation") and once again document very fiercely. Again, I prefer the first trick for its (relative) cleanliness.

Answer 2

Java has two kinds of exceptions, checked and unchecked. You must declare checked exceptions, but you don't have to declare unchecked exceptions.

RuntimeException is the basic unchecked exception, so you can throw that without declaring it.

public void getSomething(){
   throw new RuntimeException("I don't have to be declared in the method header!");
}

As a side note, you probably don't want to throw a raw RuntimeException, but subclass it to something more specific to your needs. Any subclass of RuntimeException will be unchecked as well.

Answer 3

I don't know what you were trying to do. You could just throw an unchecked exception inside your method and then test using JUnit like in my example below.

public void getSomething() {
    throw new RuntimeException();
}

JUnit 4 test example:

@Test
public void testGetSomething() {
    try {
        getSomething();
        fail("Expecting RuntimeException!");
    } catch (Exception e) {
        Logger.getLogger("test").info("Exception was caught: " + e.getClass());
    }
}