How to catch up Exception message?

Question

i have a question while using try{ ... }catch{ ... } clauses. for when update, delete, databse, there might be error occurred. all to often i do not deal with the message, only if to check log when serious problem i have to find it out; but i hope to learn how if i am able to display message of my own while erro occurrs. for instance, when falling into SQLException, originaly i might just utilize
}catch(SQLException e){
e.printStackTrace();
is it possible for me to catch up message inside the printStackTrace that may happen while errors appearing? (or only down to catch{} clause be the last deadline that i am able to use? because i hope i am able to capture error code like ora-1234 and tranlate it into messages that user, who doesn't know too much about pc, can understand easily while reporting bug; and not just saying "we have problem here!")
that is, if 'A' situation popping out, i hope to direct it to error page with special message shown. so does the same error page with different message specified while 'B' situation found out!
any suggestions would be appreciated~
thanks in advice,

Answer 1

printStackTrace isn't obligatory. It's basically what you do with an exception when you don't have anything more specific to do with it.
You can certainly catch a specific exception at any level, including inside another try {} block.
Even having caught an exception you can decide that you don't want to handle it at this point in the code, and throw it again.
You might do:
try {
     try {
       ... statment which migh cause a particular database exception
        } catch(SQLException e) {
        if(e.getMessage().startsWith("ORA-1232")) {
          .. do somthing usefull
         } else
        throw e;   // the particular SQL exception was unexpected so go on and crash
   catch(Exception e) {
     e.printStackTrace();   // unexpected program failure