Thrown when an application tries to load in a class through its string name using:
- The
forName
method in class Class
.
- The
findSystemClass
method in class ClassLoader
.
- The
loadClass
method in class ClassLoader
.
but no definition for the class with the specified name could be found.
As of release 1.4, this exception has been retrofitted to conform to the general purpose exception-chaining mechanism. The "optional exception that was raised while loading the class" that may be provided at construction time and accessed via the getException()
method is now known as the cause, and may be accessed via the Throwable.getCause()
method, as well as the aforementioned "legacy method."