Recursive call in catch block method who return value

Question

This is my problem :

I have to get a connection to a broker service (here activemq), so I do that :

public GenericMessageManager(String url, String producerQueue,
        String consumerQueue) {

    Connection connection;
    try {
        connection = getConnection(url);
        session = connection.createSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);
        producer = createProducer(producerQueue);
        consumer = createConsumer(consumerQueue);
        connection.start();
        logger.info("Connection to broker started");
    } catch (JMSException e) {

    }
}

private Connection getConnection(String url) {
    ActiveMQConnectionFactory connectionFactory = new ActiveMQConnectionFactory(
            url);
    try {
        Connection connection = connectionFactory.createConnection();
        return connection;
    } catch (JMSException e) {
        if (e.getLinkedException() instanceof SocketTimeoutException) {
            logger.warn(url + " not responding, try on localhost");
            getConnection("tcp://127.0.0.1:61616");
        }
    }
    return null;
}

In the getConnection() method I do a recursive call with another url if I catch a SocketTimeOutException. That's work but the first call return null before the second and I get a NPE on connection.createSession(...);

I don't know what can I do to solve it ?

Answer 1

I wouldn't solve this via recursion, since it doesn't seem intuitively to be a problem requiring recursion as such. I would rather configure a list of valid hosts, and try them in order eg

for (String host : hosts) {
   try {
      Connection c = getConnection(host);
      if (c != null) { 
         return c;
      }
      // log here (not sure I'd return null at all, mind)
   }
   catch (Exception e) {
      // log here...
   }
}
// fail completely

and consistently throw an exception in the case of failure, rather than confuse the meaning/handling of exceptions and nulls.

The above isolates the making of the connection (and error handling) from the retry mechanism, and arguably makes it simpler and more comprehensible.