CodeSOD: Is the Table Empty?

Sean has a lucrative career as a consultant/contractor. As such, he spends a great deal of time in other people's code bases, and finds things like a method with this signature:

public boolean isTableEmpty()

Already, you're in trouble. Methods which operate directly on "tables" are a code-smell, yes, even in a data-driven application. You want to operate on business objects, and unless you're a furniture store, tables are not business objects. You might think in those terms when building some of your lower-level components, but then you'd expect to see things like string tableName in the parameter list.

Now, maybe I'm just being opinionated. Maybe there's a perfectly valid reason to build a method like this that I can't imagine. Well, let's check the implementation.

public boolean isTableEmpty(){ boolean res = false; Connection conn = cpInstance.getConnection(); try (PreparedStatement ps = conn.prepareStatement("select * from some_table")) { try (ResultSet rs = ps.executeQuery()) { if (rs.first()) { res = true; } } catch (SQLException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } finally { try { conn.close(); } catch (SQLException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } return res;}

Even if you think this method should exist, it shouldn't exist like this. No COUNT(*) or LIMIT in the query. Using exceptions as flow control. And the best part: returning the opposite of what the method name implies. false tells us the table is empty.

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