Thrown to indicate an incomplete argument to a method. This exception supplements the standard IllegalArgumentException by providing a more semantically rich description of the problem.

IncompleteArgumentException represents the case where a method takes in a parameter that has a number of properties, some of which have not been set. A case might be a search requirements bean that must have three properties set in order for the method to run, but only one is actually set. This exception would be used in place of IllegalArgumentException, yet it still extends it.

 public void foo(PersonSearcher search) {
   if (search.getSurname() == null ||
       search.getForename() == null ||
       search.getSex() == null) {
     throw new IncompleteArgumentException("search");
   }
   // do something with the searcher
 }