Enterprise Exception Best Practices (Anti-Patterns to Avoid)

1Concept

Critical enterprise exception guidelines: 1. NEVER swallow exceptions (`catch (Exception e) {}`); 2. Do NOT catch `Throwable` or `Error`; 3. Log an exception OR throw it—never do both (causes duplicate log spam); 4. Preserve stack traces by avoiding `throw e` in new exceptions without cause.

2Architecture Diagram

Anti-Pattern:   catch (Exception e) {} ---> Silent Failure (Disaster in production!)
Best Practice:  catch (Exception e) { log.error("Context", e); throw new DomainException(e); }

3Code Example

public class ExceptionBestPracticesDemo {
    public static void executeSafely() {
        try {
            int division = 10 / 0;
        } catch (ArithmeticException ex) {
            // Best Practice: Log context and rethrow with preserved root cause
            System.err.println("Logging incident ID [INC-9912]: " + ex.getMessage());
            System.err.println("Notification dispatched to SRE on-call team.");
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        executeSafely();
        System.out.println("Application handled incident and remained resilient.");
    }
}

4Expected Output

Logging incident ID [INC-9912]: / by zero
Notification dispatched to SRE on-call team.
Application handled incident and remained resilient.

5Key Takeaways

• ✓Swallowing exceptions hides critical production bugs and leads to silent data corruption.
• ✓Use centralized exception handlers (like Spring `@ControllerAdvice`) for unified API error responses.
• ✓Include correlation IDs or request IDs in error messages for distributed tracing.