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POWhat is an alternative to exceptions for flow control?
 

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  1. POWhat is an alternative to exceptions for flow control?
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    <p>I inherited a java application that processes requests and throws an exception if it determines a request should be cancelled. Exceptions have been convenient for the previous developer because they are an easy way to exit out of a tree of logic that no longer applies (yes a goto) and it prints a stack trace to the log which is good info to have. It seems to be the consenus on forums and blogs that exceptions should not be used for flow control and over half of the requests processed are cancelled, so they're definitely not exceptional situations. One argument is performance, which doesn't apply because our exception-ful code has run fast enough for years. Another argument is that the goto-ness of it is not clear, which I agree with. My question is: What is the alternative. The only thing I can think of is to have every method return true if processing should continue or false if it shouldn't. This seems like it would hugely bloat my code changing this:</p> <pre><code>checkSomething(); checkSomethingElse(); </code></pre> <p>into this:</p> <pre><code>boolean continueProcessing = false; continueProcessing = checkSomething(); if (!continueProcessing) { return false; } continueProcessing = checkSomethingElse(); if (!continueProcessing) { return false; } </code></pre> <p>And then what if the method is supposed to return something? Any guidance would be great. I'd really like to observe whatever "best practices" are available.</p> <p>Update:</p> <p>Another bit I probably should have mentioned in the first place is that a request is cancelled more than 50% of the time and does not mean something didn't go right, it means the request wasn't needed after all.</p>
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    1. COI think *checked* exceptions describe intent perfectly (as opposed to GOTOs). I don't see a problem with this. Make sure to define your own exceptions, with enough concrete information to handle your exceptional cases (multiple catch blocks are fine for this).
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    2. COThere's nothing wrong with goto when they're used appropriately. The only thing is, most of the time, they're not used appropriately.
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    3. CODon't change anything for the sake of change. It works, and works good -- let it be. Abstract ideas are good, but working code is better.
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      1. USVladimir Dyuzhev
 

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