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Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

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Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)
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eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
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Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

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Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

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eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

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Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)
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Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.

I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

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Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)
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All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.

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Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
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Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

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Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll cover how to create a custom exception in Java.

We’ll show how user-defined exceptions are implemented and used for both checked and unchecked exceptions.

Further reading:

Exception Handling in Java

Learn the basics of exception handling in Java as well as some best and worst practices.

Checked and Unchecked Exceptions in Java

Learn the differences between Java's checked and unchecked exception with some examples

Common Java Exceptions

A quick overview to the common Java Exceptions.

2. The Need for Custom Exceptions

Java exceptions cover almost all general exceptions that are bound to happen in programming.

However, we sometimes need to supplement these standard exceptions with our own.

These are the main reasons for introducing custom exceptions:

  • Business logic exceptions – exceptions that are specific to the business logic and workflow. These help the application users or the developers understand what the exact problem is.
  • To catch and provide specific treatment to a subset of existing Java exceptions

Java exceptions can be checked and unchecked. In the next sections, we’ll cover both of these cases.

3. Custom Checked Exception

Checked exceptions are exceptions that need to be treated explicitly.

Let’s consider a piece of code that returns the first line of the file:

try (Scanner file = new Scanner(new File(fileName))) {
    if (file.hasNextLine()) return file.nextLine();
} catch(FileNotFoundException e) {
    // Logging, etc 
}

The code above is a classic way of handling Java checked exceptions. While the code throws FileNotFoundException, it’s not clear what the exact cause is — whether the file doesn’t exist or the file name is invalid.

To create a custom exception, we have to extend the java.lang.Exception class.

Let’s see an example of this by creating a custom checked exception called IncorrectFileNameException:

public class IncorrectFileNameException extends Exception { 
    public IncorrectFileNameException(String errorMessage) {
        super(errorMessage);
    }
}

Note that we also have to provide a constructor that takes a String as the error message and called the parent class constructor.

This is all we need to do to define a custom exception.

Next, let’s see how we can use the custom exception in our example:

try (Scanner file = new Scanner(new File(fileName))) {
    if (file.hasNextLine())
        return file.nextLine();
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
    if (!isCorrectFileName(fileName)) {
        throw new IncorrectFileNameException("Incorrect filename : " + fileName );
    }
    //...
}

We’ve created and used a custom exception, so the user can now know what the exact exception is.

Is this enough? We are consequently losing the root cause of the exception.

To fix this, we can also add a java.lang.Throwable parameter to the constructor. This way, we can pass the root exception to the method call:

public IncorrectFileNameException(String errorMessage, Throwable err) {
    super(errorMessage, err);
}

Now the IncorrectFileNameException is used along with the root cause of the exception:

try (Scanner file = new Scanner(new File(fileName))) {
    if (file.hasNextLine()) {
        return file.nextLine();
    }
} catch (FileNotFoundException err) {
    if (!isCorrectFileName(fileName)) {
        throw new IncorrectFileNameException(
          "Incorrect filename : " + fileName , err);
    }
    // ...
}

This is how we can use custom exceptions without losing the root cause from which they occurred.

4. Custom Unchecked Exception

In our same example, let’s assume that we need a custom exception if the file name doesn’t contain any extension.

In this case, we’ll need a custom unchecked exception similar to the previous one, as this error will only be detected during runtime.

To create a custom unchecked exception, we need to extend the java.lang.RuntimeException class:

public class IncorrectFileExtensionException 
  extends RuntimeException {
    public IncorrectFileExtensionException(String errorMessage, Throwable err) {
        super(errorMessage, err);
    }
}

This way, we can use this custom unchecked exception in our example:

try (Scanner file = new Scanner(new File(fileName))) {
    if (file.hasNextLine()) {
        return file.nextLine();
    } else {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Non readable file");
    }
} catch (FileNotFoundException err) {
    if (!isCorrectFileName(fileName)) {
        throw new IncorrectFileNameException(
          "Incorrect filename : " + fileName , err);
    }
    
    //...
} catch(IllegalArgumentException err) {
    if(!containsExtension(fileName)) {
        throw new IncorrectFileExtensionException(
          "Filename does not contain extension : " + fileName, err);
    }
    
    //...
}

5. Conclusion

Custom exceptions are very useful when we need to handle specific exceptions related to the business logic. When used properly, they can serve as a practical tool for better exception handling and logging.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (All)
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eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)