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Why do some Java methods throw exceptions that are subclasses of another exception that they also throw?

One example is org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient.executeMethod(HttpMethod method). It throws the HttpException, which is a subclass of the IOException, which it also throws. Syntactically, it would have been okay to just throw the more general (in this case, IO) exception and to omit the HttpException from the throws clause.

Does listing more specific exceptions in the throws clause of a method beside a more general one accomplish anything?

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  • What's your question about - why throw or why declare throws?
    – Ordous
    Sep 30, 2016 at 15:29
  • that sounds like a pedantic question but i'll answer it nonetheless: why declare a redundant throw
    – amphibient
    Sep 30, 2016 at 15:31
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    The body and title are different, hence the question. As to the answer, is this one not suitable for you?
    – Ordous
    Sep 30, 2016 at 15:34
  • so basically, as per that answer, it is completely redundant, correct ?
    – amphibient
    Sep 30, 2016 at 15:37
  • It has no syntactic implications, yes. Just emphasis, that might have been better put into Javadoc.
    – Ordous
    Sep 30, 2016 at 15:38

2 Answers 2

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The usual reason for having separate exceptions is that it gives more information to the caller.

For example, IOExceptions usually refer to connectivity issues e.g. sockets closing, files not available. HttpException probably refers to a problem with the http protocol.

The practical reasons for differentiating are two-fold:

  1. you may wish to recover differently to the exceptions e.g. it could be worth retrying a broken socket but probably not if the socket isn't actually connected to an http server.
  2. you may wish to log/report the exceptions differently.

Having one a subclass of the other is useful for ergonomics. If you don't want to handle them separately you can just catch IOExceptions and handle them once. This is better than a list of catch blocks that do the same thing or, worse, catching Exception which is generally bad form as you could end up in an indeterminate state.

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  • 2
    The question wasn't about why throw multiple exceptions that are subclasses of each other, but rather why would you declare it in the method signature (this was clarified in the question comments)
    – Ordous
    Sep 30, 2016 at 16:14
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    The answer is relevant anyway; I upvoted.
    – Robert Harvey
    Sep 30, 2016 at 16:28
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    @ordus the title of the question currently is "Why throw exception that is subclass of another exception also thrown?". If you feel that the title is wrong you could suggest an edit.
    – Bent
    Sep 30, 2016 at 19:06
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There is no difference for the compiler, it will not enforce anything on top of what it already does. Some people do it to emphasize that this is a particular subclass of exceptions you might want to consider. Quite a few IDE's flag it up as a warning, since (and I agree with them here) the correct place for such emphasis is the method Javadoc.

(Original content taken from here, however I didn't find a suitable duplicate on this site)

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