There are a number of cases where something needs to be done only in the case where an exception is thrown (checked or not). A first pass on this would look like:

    ...
    // allow the user to do something.  If it fails for any reason 
    // the error flag must be set so that further operations are not
    // attempted.
    try
    {
        doSomething();
    } catch(final Throwable t)
    {
        // some exception has been thrown; set the error flag.
        error = true;

        // continue the exception
        throw t;
    }
    ...

The problem with this is that unless the method signature includes throws Throwable you're out of luck. To circumvent this, I do the following:

    ...
    // allow the user to do something.  If it fails for any reason 
    // the error flag must be set so that further operations are not
    // attempted.
    boolean exceptionThrown = true; // set to false -only- if successful
    try
    {
        doSomething();

        // no exceptions were thrown
        exceptionThrown = false;
    } finally
    {
        // if there was an exception thrown (exceptionThrown will have
        // been set to false if an exception was -not- thrown) then set
        // the error flag.
        if(exceptionThrown)
            error = true;
        /* else -- there was no exception thrown */
    }
    ...

Are there any better techniques out there or is this acceptable?