PostConstruct Swallows Exceptions

While troubleshooting a non-working web service that was deployed on WebLogic 10.3.6. no error appeared in the the logs. This webservice was implemented using a fire & forget message pattern so I didn't have a response message I could verify neither.

After a more careful look in the logs I noticed the logging completely stopped after the web service invoked a specific EJB. Unable to debug further I added a response to the message exchange and noticed the following error in the response:

ExceptionEJB Exception: com.oracle.pitchfork.interfaces.LifecycleCallbackException: Failure to invoke private void ... on bean class  ... with args: []

As it turns out the @PostConstruct in one of those EJB's was not working properly and threw an exception.

When an exception is thrown while executing @PostConstruct WebLogic swallows the error. A quick search showed I am not the only one having this problem and similar behavior is observed in JBoss and GlassFish as well.

As a solution I wrapped the initialization code of the @PostConstruct in a try-catch block, logging any exception that occurs and rethrow the exception in a RuntimeException; Checked exceptions are not allowed in methods annotated with @PostConstruct.

Example:

@Stateless
public class MyEJB implements MyEJBLocal {

    private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(MyEJB.class);

    @PostConstruct
    private void init() {
        try {
            // -- do stuff
        } catch (Throwable e) {
            LOGGER.error("Error occurred during initialization of MyEJB", e);
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }
}

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