After a very bad attempt at doing my homework, I decided it would be faster to abandon everything and start from scratch. Well not everything ... I copied this part since it worked perfectly so I saw no need to modify it. While maybe not perfect, it worked.
However now, when I compile just to test it out, I get an unexpected error:
Input error: java.io.EOFException.
Notice that "Input error" is from my catch(IOException ioe).
The file (fileName) is completely empty. Nothing in it. What could cause this. Is there a way to tell the ObjectInputStream to do nothing if the file is empty ?
Also I tested this out with an empty file on my other "iteration", didn't have this problem. I even named my file the same.
public Repository (String fileName) throws FileNotFoundException,
IOException,
SecurityException,
ClassNotFoundException {
this.fileName = fileName;
this.clients = new ArrayList<Client> ();
FileInputStream fileIn = null;
ObjectInputStream in = null;
try {
fileIn = new FileInputStream(this.fileName);
in = new ObjectInputStream(fileIn);
this.clients = (ArrayList<Client>) in.readObject();
} catch (FileNotFoundException fnfe) {
System.out.println("File not found, error: " + fnfe);
} catch (IOException ioe) {
System.out.println("Input error: " + ioe);
} catch (ClassNotFoundException cnfe) {
System.out.println("Class not found, error: " + cnfe);
} catch (SecurityException se) {
System.out.println(
"You do not have permission to access this file, error: "
+ se);
} finally {
if (fileIn != null)
fileIn.close();
if (in != null)
in.close();
}
Surely before
in = new ObjectInputStream(fileIn);
this.clients = (ArrayList<Client>) in.readObject();
you want to check the file size via File.length().
I assume if it's empty then you'd want to return an empty array list. You can't do that via deserialising an empty file. After all, even an empty array list has a non-zero size (and would need to identify itself as an array list via serialised attributes)