"Exception" should not be caught when not required by called methods

Catching Exception seems like an efficient way to handle multiple possible exceptions. Unfortunately, it traps all exception types, both checked and runtime exceptions, thereby casting too broad a net. Indeed, was it really the intention of developers to also catch runtime exceptions? To prevent any misunderstanding, if both checked and runtime exceptions are really expected to be caught, they should be explicitly listed in the catch clause.

This rule raises an issue if Exception is caught when it is not explicitly thrown by a method in the try block.

Noncompliant Code Example

try {
  // do something that might throw an UnsupportedDataTypeException or UnsupportedEncodingException
} catch (Exception e) { // Noncompliant
  // log exception ...
}

Compliant Solution

try {
  // do something
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException|UnsupportedDataTypeException|RuntimeException e) {
  // log exception ...
}

or if runtime exceptions should not be caught:

try {
  // do something
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException|UnsupportedDataTypeException e) {
  // log exception ...
}

See

• MITRE, CWE-396 - Declaration of Catch for Generic Exception