Building an exception with the right message

Question

Hello,
I'm trying to build an exception that when created you pass it a error code, and it will set the message by itself. Here my code:
public class DatabaseOperationException extends Exception {
  private int code=0;
  public DatabaseOperationException() {
    super();
  public DatabaseOperationException(int codenumber) {
    switch (codenumber){
      case 80 : super("Invalid Bank ID"); break;
      default : super("Error unknown");
    code = codenumber;
  public int GetCodeNumber(){
    return code;
}Now when I compile I get:
"DatabaseOperationException.java": Error #: 361 : method required, but value found at line 21, column 17
It seem that super() need to be the first line. However if I call super on the first line I can't find a method of Exception to set the message retrieve by the method .getmessage().
what am i missing?
thanks.

Answer 1

You aren't missing anything, you just can't do that. Dam nuisance sometimes. Try adding a factory method to produce customized exceptions:public class DatabaseOperationException extends Exception {
  private int code=0;
  public DatabaseOperationException() {
    super();
  public DatabaseOperationException(int codenumber, String message) {
    super(message);
    code = codenumber;
  public static DatabaseOperationException createException(int codenumber) {
    switch (codenumber){
      case 80 : return new DatabaseOperationException(codenumber, "Invalid Bank ID"); break;
      default : return new DatabaseOperationException(codenumber, "Error unknown");
  public int GetCodeNumber(){
    return code;
}As you get more error codes, you could then do a table lookup to get the description instead of hard-coding a switch statement.
Another approach is to create a subclass of DatabaseOperationException for each different exception that can occur, although you wouldn't want to do this if there were say 30 different exceptions.