Way too little information to base an answer on in your question. However my general approach to exception handling and try catch is to group the error into two

Way too little information to base an answer on in your question. However my general approach to exception handling and try catch is to group the error into two possible categories: 1. Errors that someone up the call chain should be handling. 2. Errors that should abort the process or application entirely. Unrecoverable errors basically. For the first one it's important to model the exception correctly. You want to provide enough information for the someone in the call chain to properly handle it. For the second one you just let the exception bubble all the way up. Crashing may be the only correct course of action. In general if you are using try catch in place of `if obj == null` then you aren't really saving any effort in typing and your solution is way more expensive than the null check.