Refactoring 004 — Remove Unhandled Exceptions

Creating YAGNI exception classes pollutes our environment. Let’s remove them.

Image by danielkirsch from Pixabay

TL;DR: Remove unnecessary and not references empty exception classes.

Problems Addressed

• Empty Classes
• Namespace Polluted

Related Code Smells

Code Smell 26 — Exceptions Polluting

Steps

1. Check there are no references to the empty exception class.

2. Replace the throw sentence with a generic one.

Sample Code

Before

After

Type

[X] Automatic

If the Exception class has no references we can perform a Safe Remove and replace it with *Exception* class.

Why the code is better?

• We remove an empty class nobody uses.
• We shrink the code

Limitations

If we need to declare an empty exception class as documentation for an API module, our clients might need to catch it.

This is a gold plating and YAGNI example.

Tags

• Clean up

Related Refactorings

• Safe Remove

This article is part of the Refactoring Series.