DefaultPicoContainer swallows exceptions and attempts parent container

Hi John,
could you attach a (failing) test case which reproduces the bevaviour that you'd like?
Thanks

The test case throws a PicoInitialisationException which is caught and ignored and then the parent adapter is used.

In my actual application this exception is thrown by the now deprecated hibernate SessionFactoryAdapter when ever a HibernateException is caught. I can see that a number of other adapters also throw it though when there is a problem instantiating the component.

I would expect that any Exceptions thrown while constructing instances should be rethrown.

I took a look at the test case (Thanks John!!!) and would tend to agree with John that the behavior seems rather fishy considering when something goes wrong in Pico's object construction Pico certainly tends to throw exceptions rather than hide the error. I also checked the existing DefaultPicoContainer test cases and didn't find anything that already enforced this behavior.

But as Tevya would say:

"On the other hand" – looking at the code, (DefaultPicoContainer.getInstance(ComponentAdapter)) it is obvious to me that the at least one developer MEANT for Pico to work that way (And went to some degree to have that behavior. Paul???). And there is at least an event in ComponentMonitor that signals if instantiation would fail. So you would see something in the logs (if they were wired up).

Anybody else have thoughts on this issue?

-Mike (R)

I've added the test case
http://svn.codehaus.org/picocontainer/java/picocontainer/trunk/container/src/test/org/picocontainer/defaults/issues/Issue0280TestCase.java

Yes - I agree, behaviour seems intentional.

But IMO we should also allow for different configurable behaviour via a ctor flag.

The idea is, that if a component in the current container cannot be created (e.g. because of missing deps), the pico will request the parent for a component with the same key. Regression is in org.picocontainer.defaults.ComponentKeysTestCase#testComponentKeysFromParentCannotConfuseTheChild()

OK, I must slightly refine my last comment. The only reason for this, is that you can register in parent and child components with the same key and you should still be able to have a dependency between them. In this case, we should simply not react on an arbitrary PicoIntrospectionException, but on a distinct CyclicDependencyException.

Jahn, can you try the lastest version from svn ?

Yes, great, that solves my problem. I made a workaround by creating a PicoExceptionComponentAdapter which caught any wrapped PicoExceptions in RuntimeExceptions so that they were no longer caught. Thanks very much!