Which is the best exception to use? Or: how to deal with a misconfigured Activity? [closed]

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This is a bit of an academic question, but I'm curious to get your input.

I have an Activity which is loosely parameterized by a type string. When creating the Activity, I will always pass in the proper type via Intent's putExtra(). But I only want that string to have a single value, and for various reasons I don't want to hard code it (though I'm weighing the idea).

At any rate, like a good writer of maintainable Java code, I will throw an exception in order to catch the high-level bug of an incorrect type value. I plan to use IllegalArgumentException. Is there a semantically better choice?

Perhaps the better question is: how best to deal with an Android Activity that is just plain configured wrong, after it is launched?

public class MyActivity {

   private String type;

   @Override
   protected void onCreate(Bundle sharedInstanceState) {
      super.onCreate(sharedInstanceState);

      Intent intent = getIntent();
      this.type = intent.getStringExtra("type");

      if (this.type == null || !this.type.equals("the proper type")) {
         // is there something semantically better?
         throw new IllegalArgumentException("You're doing it wrong.");

         // perhaps it's better just to toast.show(), Log.e(), and finish()?
      }

      // ... etc
   }
}

Answer 1

I would say, if you are shipping this as a library and want your code to look super-neat, declare your own exception (subclass RuntimeException) and throw it. Definitely no need to bother about toasts, etc when you are handling a programmatic error, not something that a user can fix.