Use descriptive message from Exception

Question

This piece of code
if (AliasesDB.validateAddress(personInfo, add).equals("invalid.format")) {
    log.info(LogHead.getLogInfo(request, personInfo) + add + "Add alias failed - invalid format.");
    actionErrors.add(ActionErrors.GLOBAL_MESSAGE, new ActionMessage("error.webapp.format"));
    saveErrors(request, actionErrors);
    return (mapping.findForward(INVALIDALIAS));
}calls AliasesDB.validateAddress() - a method that validates an email address and returns a descriptive String such as 'SUCCESS' or a descriptive error message such as 'invalid.format' depending on the results of the validation of the email string.
I think that this may be a clunky design, due to my incomplete understanding of how Java exceptions work. I have available to me another method that I could use to validate an email string.
public static boolean isNameInUse(String name, Connection c,  Ldap dir) throws  IOException, SQLException, NamingException
     PreparedStatement nameQ = c.prepareStatement("SELECT username FROM creservednames WHERE username=?");
     nameQ.setString(1,name);
     ResultSet rs = nameQ.executeQuery();
     if(rs.next() == true)
          rs.close();
          nameQ.close();
          return true;
     rs.close();
     nameQ.close();
     // search LDAP with base dc=company,dc=com
     // this includes current accounts in ou=people
     // and reserved identifiers in ou=reserve
     DirContext dc = dir.getContext();
     SearchControls sc = new SearchControls();
     sc.setSearchScope(SearchControls.SUBTREE_SCOPE);
     sc.setReturningAttributes(new String[] {"uid"});
     javax.naming.NamingEnumeration ne = dc.search("dc=company,dc=com","(|(uid="+name+")(altnName="+name+")(mailLocalAddress="+name+"@company.com))",sc);
     if(ne.hasMore()){
          return true;
     return false;
}My requirements are that I need to be able to do something based on the results of a validation operation that could have several different outcomes. I took a look at the javadoc for NamingException - is it possible to rewrite my code so that a custom string is returned when NamingException is thrown?

Answer 1

Thank you!
I was going to ask ...
the problem with the isNameInUse() method is it is boolean, but I'd like to allow for multiple error conditions so that I can redirect with an error message based on several types of error conditions. I was wondering if there was a way to use the NamingException class to generate multiple types of error message depending on the error condition.