Servlet crashes on preparedStatement.close()

Question

Hello Everyone ,
I have a servlet that gives out database information. Depending on the request parameters , some prepared statements that I declare before my try block may or may not be used. All statements and resultSets are initialized to null. If I determine the request is bad my servlet goes to an else block, then the finally block to close statements and stuff. Unfortunately, when it hits a preparedStatement that wasn't used, it outputs a HTTP Status 500 java.lang.NullPointer exception. I have never had this happen before ?
P.S I output my xml before the try block, so how come I see the error and not my xml, or a combination of both ?

Answer 1

As mentioned earlier by others, in your servlet code somewhere you are doing some operation on an object which is null. From server error log see the stack trace. Locate the exact place of NullPointerException and fix it.
I hope you know where log files are generated in server. If you need help fixing the root cause of NullPointerException please post your code snippet here.
Thanks,
Mrityunjoy