Getting the current method that this executing.

[Zak Nixon]

I have about 40 methods that need to
be overwritten and throwing an UnsupportedOperationException(...).

I want to say the following

public void sampleClass(){
 throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Can't do " + <INSERT METHOD GETTING HERE> ");
}    

The result would print out :
Can't do sampleClass.

Any suggestions would be nice.

Thanks

Zak

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Since JDK 1.4, the Throwable class has the "getStackTrace()" method, which returns an array of StackTraceElement objects, which can tell you the name of the method.

String methodName = new Throwable().getStackTrace[0].getMethodName();

In real code, I wouldn't chain all this together: getStackTrace() can return a 0-length array. You'd have to check for that.

[Jesper de Jong]

String methodName = new Throwable().getStackTrace()[0].getMethodName();

Note that Ernest forgot the () after getStackTrace. To make it safe against getStackTrace() returning an empty array, you'd write it like this:

StackTraceElement[] s = new Throwable().getStackTrace();
String methodName = s.length > 0 ? s[0].getMethodName() : "<unknown>";

[ July 25, 2006: Message edited by: Jesper Young ]

[Peter Chase]

The above posts do give good guidance about how to get the current method name. However, I am a bit doubtful why you want to do that, in your particular example.

Do the exception messages really need to contain the method name? The exception stack traces will make the method name clear anyway. Perhaps you are logging exception messages, but not logging stack traces?

If you do need the method name in the message, I would have thought it would be quicker for you, faster to execute, easier to maintain just to "bite the bullet" and type in those 40 method names. If you want to be really flash, a smart editor could probably be programmed to do it automatically (I reckon I could get emacs to do it).

In general, always favour simple obvious code over clever code. As a rule, if someone says your code is "clever", it's an insult, not a compliment!