Closing inputstreams in Java

Question

I have the following piece of code in a try/catch block

 InputStream inputstream = conn.getInputStream();
 InputStreamReader inputstreamreader = new  InputSt         


        

Answer 1

You only need to close the actual resource. You should close the resource even if constructing decorators fails. For output, you should flush the most decorator object in the happy case.

Some complications:

• Sometimes the decorators are different resources (some compression implementations use the C heap).
• Closing decorators in sad cases actually causes flushes, with ensuing confusion such as not actually closing the underlying resource.
• It looks like you underlying resource is a URLConnection, which doesn't have a disconnect/close method as such.

You may wish to consider using the Execute Around idiom so you don't have to duplicate this sort of thing.