Can a class have its own private PrintWriter?

Question

I'm writing a Table class, which stores column name and length information about a relation. The class itself doesn't store the records/tuples, however, as that information is supposed to be directly entered into a txt file via an Insert method. To make the insert method easier by not recreating a printwriter for every call, can the Table class have its own Printwriter that I can call from Table.insert? Basically,

public class Table{
    private String tableName;
    private PrintWriter writer;

    public void Table(){
        //get table name
        writer = new PrintWriter(tableName+".txt"); 
    ...}

    public void insert(){
        //get, format, add info to file
        writer.format(formatstring, args);
    }

Are there any flaws with this use of PrintWriter?

Answer 1

In a word - yes, you can hold a PrintWriter member. Since you're dealing with a filesystem here, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong when creating the PrintWriter . It may be a better practice to open it in a constructor (instead of inlining it in the member's definition) to allow proper exception handling.