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Constructors

When writing code with exceptions, it’s particularly important that you always ask, “If an exception occurs, will this be properly cleaned up?” Most of the time you’re fairly safe, but in constructors there’s a problem. The constructor puts the object into a safe starting state, but it might perform some operation – such as opening a file – that doesn’t get cleaned up until the user is finished with the object and calls a special cleanup method. If you throw an exception from inside a constructor, these cleanup behaviors might not occur properly. This means that you must be especially diligent while you write your constructor.

Since you’ve just learned about finally, you might think that it is the correct solution. But it’s not quite that simple, because finally performs the cleanup code every time , even in the situations in which you don’t want the cleanup code executed until the cleanup method runs. Thus, if you do perform cleanup in finally, you must set some kind of flag when the constructor finishes normally and don’t do anything in the finally block if the flag is set. Because this isn’t particularly elegant (you are coupling your code from one place to another), it’s best if you try to avoid performing this kind of cleanup in finally unless you are forced to.

In the following example, a class called InputFile is created that opens a file and allows you to read it one line (converted into a String) at a time. It uses the classes FileReader and BufferedReader from the Java standard IO library that will be discussed in Chapter 10, but which are simple enough that you probably won’t have any trouble understanding their basic use:

//: Cleanup.java
// Paying attention to exceptions
// in constructors
import java.io.*;

class InputFile {
  private BufferedReader in;
  InputFile(String fname) throws Exception {
    try {
      in = 
        new BufferedReader(
          new FileReader(fname));
      // Other code that might throw exceptions
    } catch(FileNotFoundException e) {
      System.out.println(
        "Could not open " + fname);
      // Wasn't open, so don't close it
      throw e;
    } catch(Exception e) {
      // All other exceptions must close it
      try {
        in.close();
      } catch(IOException e2) {
        System.out.println(
          "in.close() unsuccessful");
      }
      throw e;
    } finally {
      // Don't close it here!!!
    }
  }
  String getLine() {
    String s;
    try {
      s = in.readLine();
    } catch(IOException e) {
      System.out.println(
        "readLine() unsuccessful");
      s = "failed";
    }
    return s;
  }
  void cleanup() {
    try {
      in.close();
    } catch(IOException e2) {
      System.out.println(
        "in.close() unsuccessful");
    }
  }
}

public class Cleanup {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    try {
      InputFile in = 
        new InputFile("Cleanup.java");
      String s;
      int i = 1;
      while((s = in.getLine()) != null)
        System.out.println(""+ i++ + ": " + s);
      in.cleanup();
    } catch(Exception e) {
      System.out.println(
        "Caught in main, e.printStackTrace()");
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
} ///:~

This example uses Java 1.1 IO classes.

The constructor for InputFile takes a String argument, which is the name of the file you want to open. Inside a try block, it creates a FileReader using the file name. A FileReader isn’t particularly useful until you turn around and use it to create a BufferedReader that you can actually talk to – notice that one of the benefits of InputFile is that it combines these two actions.

If the FileReader constructor is unsuccessful, it throws a FileNotFoundException, which must be caught separately because that’s the one case in which you don’t want to close the file since it wasn’t successfully opened. Any other catch clauses must close the file because it was opened by the time those catch clauses are entered. (Of course, this is trickier if more than one method can throw a FileNotFoundException. In that case, you might want to break things into several try blocks.) The close( ) method throws an exception that is tried and caught even though it’s within the block of another catch clause – it’s just another pair of curly braces to the Java compiler. After performing local operations, the exception is re-thrown, which is appropriate because this constructor failed, and you wouldn’t want the calling method to assume that the object had been properly created and was valid.

In this example, which doesn’t use the aforementioned flagging technique, the finally clause is definitely not the place to close( ) the file, since that would close it every time the constructor completed. Since we want the file to be open for the useful lifetime of the InputFile object this would not be appropriate.

The getLine( ) method returns a String containing the next line in the file. It calls readLine( ), which can throw an exception, but that exception is caught so getLine( ) doesn’t throw any exceptions. One of the design issues with exceptions is whether to handle an exception completely at this level, to handle it partially and pass the same exception (or a different one) on, or whether to simply pass it on. Passing it on, when appropriate, can certainly simplify coding. The getLine( ) method becomes:

String getLine() throws IOException {
  return in.readLine();
}

But of course, the caller is now responsible for handling any IOException that might arise.

The cleanup( ) method must be called by the user when they are finished using the InputFile object to release the system resources (such as file handles) that are used by the BufferedReader and/or FileReader objects. [46] You don’t want to do this until you’re finished with the InputFile object, at the point you’re going to let it go. You might think of putting such functionality into a finalize( ) method, but as mentioned in Chapter 4 you can’t always be sure that finalize( ) will be called (even if you can be sure that it will be called, you don’t know when). This is one of the downsides to Java – all cleanup other than memory cleanup doesn’t happen automatically, so you must inform the client programmer that they are responsible, and possibly guarantee that cleanup occurs using finalize( ).

In Cleanup.java an InputFile is created to open the same source file that creates the program, and this file is read in a line at a time, and line numbers are added. All exceptions are caught generically in main( ), although you could choose greater granularity.

One of the benefits of this example is to show you why exceptions are introduced at this point in the book. Exceptions are so integral to programming in Java, especially because the compiler enforces them, that you can accomplish only so much without knowing how to work with them.

[46] In C++, a destructor would handle this for you.

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