Any very robust program will try to handle anything the user throws at it.
In this case you have passed a null value as an argument to the method and it as acted according by giving you a NUllPointerException. Perhaps wrapping this as SQLException may be more easily caught by your app., but would be deceptive in response.
Perhaps you could submit a patch for consideration, to the solution you desire. The code may be obtained at GitHub.
I found this while working with another JDBC driver (Stels XML driver). The Postgresql driver's connect() method is expecting the passed Properties object to have only string values, but this is not actually guaranteed to be the case. I think that the PG driver should wrap the NullPointerException in a SQLException, which would allow the DriverManager to attempt to use other JDBC drivers to make the connection.
Here is a simple Java program which will reproduce the problem:
public class PGTest { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { Class.forName("org.postgresql.Driver"); Properties info = new Properties(); info.put("foo", new Object()); // info.getPropert("foo") will return null DriverManager.getConnection("foo:bar//baz", info); } } ==================
and here is the stack trace produced by running that program:
================== Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at java.util.Hashtable.put(Hashtable.java:542) at java.util.Properties.setProperty(Properties.java:161) at org.postgresql.Driver.connect(Driver.java:244) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:579) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:190) at PGTest.main(PGTest.java:9) ==================
I'm using postgresql-9.2-1002.jdbc4.jar, with Java 7, running on Mac OS 10.8.2. Output of java -version: java version "1.7.0_07" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_07-b10) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.3-b01, mixed mode)
