Placement of return statement

Question

Hi,
I try to make the following bit of code working.
    public byte[] generateSignature(byte[] message) {
        try{
            signature.initSign(keyPair.getPrivate(), randomSource);
            signature.update(message);
            return signature.sign();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.println("An error has occured while generating the signature.");
            System.out.println("Exception: " + e.getMessage());
            e.printStackTrace();
            System.exit(1);
    }The return signature.sign() statement need to be inside a try clause. But if I compile this, I get an error: Missing Return Statement. I could use a bogus return statement, or return some bogus bytes, but I'm really looking for a better method. (The exit statement is not very nice here, but in some other cases I have no other solution but to exit with an errormessage.)
And I don't want to define this array of bytes in the class.
Any ideas how to solve this elegant?
Cheers,

Answer 1

The exit statement is not very nice here, but in some other cases I have no other solution but to exit with an errormessage.Yes you do, you can (and should) throw an exception to signal the failure.