When to throw an exception?

Question

I have exceptions created for every condition that my application does not expect. UserNameNotValidException, PasswordNotCorrectException etc.

Answer 1

I'd say that generally every fundamentalism leads to hell.

You certainly wouldn't want to end up with exception driven flow, but avoiding exceptions altogether is also a bad idea. You have to find a balance between both approaches. What I would not do is to create an exception type for every exceptional situation. That is not productive.

What I generally prefer is to create two basic types of exceptions which are used throughout the system: LogicalException and TechnicalException. These can be further distinguished by subtypes if needed, but it is not generally not necessary.

The technical exception denotes the really unexpected exception like database server being down, the connection to the web service threw the IOException and so on.

On the other hand the logical exceptions are used to propagate the less severe erroneous situation to the upper layers (generally some validation result).

Please note that even the logical exception is not intended to be used on regular basis to control the program flow, but rather to highlight the situation when the flow should really end. When used in Java, both exception types are RuntimeException subclasses and error handling is highly aspect oriented.

So in the login example it might be wise to create something like AuthenticationException and distinguish the concrete situations by enum values like UsernameNotExisting, PasswordMismatch etc. Then you won't end up in having a huge exception hierarchy and can keep the catch blocks on maintainable level. You can also easily employ some generic exception handling mechanism since you have the exceptions categorized and know pretty well what to propagate up to the user and how.

Our typical usage is to throw the LogicalException during the Web Service call when the user's input was invalid. The Exception gets marshalled to the SOAPFault detail and then gets unmarshalled to the exception again on the client which is resulting in showing the validation error on one certain web page input field since the exception has proper mapping to that field.

This is certainly not the only situation: you don't need to hit web service to throw up the exception. You are free to do so in any exceptional situation (like in the case you need to fail-fast) - it is all at your discretion.