[GROOVY-1062] Error messages when a depended on class is not found are not very informative

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Trivial
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 1.0-JSR-3
• Fix Version/s: 1.0-JSR-6
• Environment: groovy jsr03, jdk 142_09
• Assignee: Jochen Theodorou
• Reporter: Antti Karanta
• Created: 14/Sep/05 07:21
• Updated: 06/Jun/06 10:26
• Resolved: 06/Jun/06 10:26

Description

When using a class that depends on another class that is not available, e.g. like this:

myjar1.jar : contains foo.MyClass1, which depends on bar.MyClass2
myjar2.jar : contains bar.MyClass2

A method in MyClass1:
public MyClass2 amethod(MyClass2 arg) { //...

and only myjar1.jar is on the classpath.

Now, if you do:
def cls = Class.forName('foo.MyClass1')
def m = cls.methods

you get:

Caught: groovy.lang.GroovyRuntimeException: Cannot read property: methods

which is not very informative. The property "methods" exists (i.e. the method getMethods()).

A simple improvement would be to tell what exception caused the reading of the given property to fail. At the moment getCause() on the thrown GroovyRuntimeException returns null.