Returning true or false or throwing an exception [closed]

Answer 1

If the connection is already null, your job is done and ideally you shouldn't need to flag it as a failure. You could just log a low severity message. It really depends on what you do after the disconnection and whether you use the actual outcome of the disconnection attempt

Answer 2

In this specific case I think you should do neither. If you are telling your object to disconnect and it was already disconnected (i.e. it's already null), just don't do anything.

Answer 3

Neither one of them. I would throw a custom Exception, not even a RuntimeException. And if you really need that boolean for whatever reason, return trueif it was successful, even if the mClientConnection is null, the method did what it was intended to do.

Answer 4

Assuming you are expecting to find a value in most casesthen throwing an exception is better if its null. The exception would mean that there was a problem.

If the value can be missing or present and both are valid for the application logic or if there are other people going to use you API then return a false.

Also consistency is important so keep in sync with what you do at other places

Answer 5

Generally, return a value is so much faster than throwing a exception, because exception needs reflection and take some time to build exception data.

But depending on your project design, throw a exception might be the correct choice, since calling a method without having the connection can be considered a exception case.

Answer 6

If you write an API that other developers will use - better take the second approach, it's easier (and cleaner) to handle from the "customer" side:

while (!disconnected()) {
    // do something else
    // sleep and try again
    // etc
}

In general - don't throw exceptions that you know how to handle gracefully!