What is a good way to pass useful state information to an exception in Java?

Question

I noticed some confusion initially with my question. I\'m not asking about how to configure a logger nor how to use a logger properly, but rather how to capture all of the infor

Answer 1

We tend to create our most important application specific runtime exception classes with some special constructors, some constants and a ResourceBundle.

Example snippet:

 public class MyException extends RuntimeException
 {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 5224152764776895846L;

    private static final ResourceBundle MESSAGES;
    static
    {
        MESSAGES = ResourceBundle.getBundle("....MyExceptionMessages");
    }

    public static final String NO_CODE = "unknown";
    public static final String PROBLEMCODEONE = "problemCodeOne";
    public static final String PROBLEMCODETWO = "problemCodeTwo";
    // ... some more self-descriptive problem code constants

    private String errorCode = NO_CODE;
    private Object[] parameters = null;

    // Define some constructors

    public MyException(String errorCode)
    {
        super();
        this.errorCode = errorCode;
    }

    public MyException(String errorCode, Object[] parameters)   
    {
        this.errorCode = errorCode;
        this.parameters = parameters;
    }

    public MyException(String errorCode, Throwable cause)
    {
        super(cause);
        this.errorCode = errorCode;
    }

    public MyException(String errorCode, Object[] parameters, Throwable cause)
    {
        super(cause);
        this.errorCode = errorCode;
        this.parameters = parameters;
    }   

    @Override
    public String getLocalizedMessage()
    {
        if (NO_CODE.equals(errorCode))
        {
            return super.getLocalizedMessage();
        }

        String msg = MESSAGES.getString(errorCode); 
        if(parameters == null)
        {
            return msg;
        }
        return MessageFormat.format(msg, parameters);
    }
 }

In the properties file we specify the exception descriptions, e.g.:

 problemCodeOne=Simple exception message
 problemCodeTwo=Parameterized exception message for {0} value

Using this approach

• We can use quite readable and understandable throw clauses (throw new MyException(MyException.PROBLEMCODETWO, new Object[] {parameter}, bthe))
• The exception messages are "centralized", can easily maintained and "internationalized"

EDIT: change getMessage to getLocalizedMessage as Elijah suggested.

EDIT2: Forgot to mention: this approach does not support Locale changing "on-the-fly" but it is intentional (it can be implemented if you need it).