rationale for swallowing exceptions in Class#getEnumConstantsShared

[Peter Levart]

On 02/28/2014 04:56 PM, Jochen Theodorou wrote:
> Hi,
>
> we stumbled here about a strange error involving enums generated from 
> our compiler and that did make me see getEnumConstantsShared() in 
> java.lang.Class.
>
> Now the implementation more or less says, that if calling values() 
> fails in any way, return null and ignore the exception. But why is the 
> exception ignored? It could contain valuable information about what 
> did go wrong....

Hi Jochen,

I agree that the exception should be thrown (possibly an unchecked 
IllegalArgumentException or something like that with the cause from 
reflective operation). If Class.isEnum() returns true then the class 
should be considered an enum and if it is not conformant to 
specification (which may cause one of those exceptions) then this should 
be reported as exception and not as null return. The 
getEnumConstantsShared() is also used as implementation for public method:

     /**
      * Returns the elements of this enum class or *null if this**
**     * Class object does not represent an enum type*.
      *
      * @return an array containing the values comprising the enum class
      *     represented by this Class object in the order they're
      *     declared, or null if this Class object does not
      *     represent an enum type
      * @since 1.5
      */
     public T[] getEnumConstants() {
         T[] values = getEnumConstantsShared();
         return (values != null) ? values.clone() : null;
     }


The behaviour of above method is not consistent with:

     /**
      * Returns *true if and only if this class was declared as an enum* 
in the
      * source code.
      *
      * @return true if and only if this class was declared as an enum 
in the
      *     source code
      * @since 1.5
      */
     public boolean isEnum() {
         // An enum must both directly extend java.lang.Enum and have
         // the ENUM bit set; classes for specialized enum constants
         // don't do the former.
         return (this.getModifiers() & ENUM) != 0 &&
         this.getSuperclass() == java.lang.Enum.class;
     }


...which can return true at the same time as getEnumConstants() returns 
null for the same class...


I don't believe there's any code out there that relies on this faulty 
behaviour of getEnumConstants() public method. The other use of 
getEnumConstantsShared() is to support the Enum.valueOf(Class, String) 
method which already throws IllegalArgumentException if the 1st 
parameter does not represent an enum class, so there's no compatibility 
concerns about that use.


What do experts say?


Regards, Peter

>
> In my code for example, something obviously goes wrong... sometimes... 
> depending on moon-phases or something. and I have not the slightest 
> idea what.
>
> bye Jochen
>
>