Thursday, March 09, 2006

Stopping MQExceptions being logged to the console in Java

I've been writing some Java code that uses the WebSphere MQ base Java API. When there is an error, even if the MQException is caught, I've been finding that the exception is logged to the console.

There's a simple way to stop this from happening. Somewhere in your initialization method, you can include this statement:

// by default, MQExceptions are logged on System.err
// this will switch off that behaviour
MQException.log = null;


Of course, you can - and should! - still catch and handle the exceptions as normal, and get at the text of the exception if required. This just prevents them from always being printed on the console (or location of System.err).

2 comments:

MÃ¥rten Gustafson said...

Pretty awkward behaviour to have all the exceptions logged by default imho. Actually I don't think libraries should log at all but rather provide some form of hook, or as Nat Pryce puts it "Tell, don't log": http://nat.truemesh.com/archives/000488.html

Andy Piper said...

I'm inclined to agree with you, and I will feed this back to the development team.