Why Cucumber repeats Java/Selenium exception text?

Question

For example, tried to locale a web page element by ID and it was not there - why Cucumber repeats the Java output (in addition to - expected - its own scenario/feature/steps failure text) and can I prevent that?

 Testing started at 4:51 PM ...
 Nov 28, 2018 4:51:48 PM org.openqa.selenium.remote.ProtocolHandshake createSession
 INFO: Detected dialect: OSS
 ================== Beginning ===================================
 org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException:
>>>ERROR. There is no Translation status column
 For documentation on this error, please visit: http://seleniumhq.org/exceptions/no_such_element.html
 Build info: version: '3.14.0', revision: 'aacccce0', time: '2018-08-02T20:19:58.91Z'
 System info: host: 'T1650', ip: '10.68.1.61', os.name: 'Windows 7', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '6.1', java.version: '1.8.0_144'
 Driver info: driver.version: unknown
 at pageObjects.VerificationPage.findStatusIcon(VerificationPage.java:40)
 at stepDefinitions.VerificationPageSteps.user_verifies_translation_status(VerificationPageSteps.java:24)
 at *.Then BitBucket user verifies Translation Status(C:/Verification/src/test/resources/features/Verification_Test.feature:11)
 ******************** Ending ***********************************
 Failed scenarios:
 c:/Verification/src/test/resources/features/Verification_Test.feature:8 # Scenario: User checks a repository
 1 Scenarios (1 failed)
 3 Steps (1 failed, 2 passed)
 0m20.931s
 org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException: 
>>>ERROR. There is no Translation status column
 For documentation on this error, please visit: http://seleniumhq.org/exceptions/no_such_element.html
 Build info: version: '3.14.0', revision: 'aacccce0', time: '2018-08-02T20:19:58.91Z'
 System info: host: 'T1650', ip: '10.68.1.61', os.name: 'Windows 7', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '6.1', java.version: '1.8.0_144'
 Driver info: driver.version: unknown
 at pageObjects.VerificationPage.findStatusIcon(VerificationPage.java:40)
 at stepDefinitions.VerificationPageSteps.user_verifies_translation_status(VerificationPageSteps.java:24)
 at *.Then BitBucket user verifies Translation Status(C:/Verification/src/test/resources/features/Verification_Test.feature:11)
 Picked up JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
 Process finished with exit code 1/

---

step definition (looks for a special column in Branches page of Bitbucket (stash)):

public class TranslationVerificationPageSteps {
 private TestContext testContext;
 private TranslationVerificationPage translationVerificationPage;
 public TranslationVerificationPageSteps(TestContext context) {
 testContext = context;
 translationVerificationPage = testContext.getPageObjectManager().getTranslationVerificationPage();
 }
 @Then("^BitBucket user verifies Translation Status$")
 public void user_verifies_translation_status(){
 translationVerificationPage.findTranslationStatusIcon();
 }
}

Implementation (just to show that I tried other ways - the majority of those commented out variants also produce that effect - Java/Selenium exception text is shown twice - or Java error text is not shown at all):

try {
 translationColumn = driver.findElement(By.id("translation-status-branch-list-col"));
 } catch (NoSuchElementException e) {
 throw new NoSuchElementException("\n\n>>>ERROR. There is no Translation status column\n");
 // variant 2
 //Assert.fail("\n\n>>>ERROR. Test failed: no Translation status column\n\n");
// variant 3
 // throw new AssertionError("\n\n>>>ERROR. Test failed: no Translation status column\n\n");
 }
// variant 4
// try {
// Assert.assertNotNull(translationColumn);
//
// } catch (AssertionError foo) {
// System.out.println("\n\nTest failed: no Translation status column\n\n");
// //e.printStackTrace();
// //System.out.println(e.getMessage());
//
// }

• Alexey R.: Please add step definition code
• Paul G: Added step definition to my question above
• Martin Spamer: There is no point in trapping an exception to just rethrow it, since you are changing the exception message, if you catch it then wrap it in a new custom exception, otherwise ignore it and let your test framework, cucumber in this case report it.
• Paul G: I did rethrow because catch (NoSuchElementException e) did not cause (expected) abrupted failure of my test

Answer 1

I did some debugging and it looks like I can answer my own question - though, IMHO, it's a bug in Cucumber:

1) First, it's Java/Selenium failure text - it's the text (given in Question's "code" part) between
================== Beginning ===
and
================== Ending =

2) Now, Cucumber starts to process the failure and prints out the information -

in this.printSummary() method (Runtime.class):

a) prints out failed Step/Feature information - which is good and expected

b) prints out - again :-( - same Java/Selenium failure text that has been already printed.

public void run() throws IOException {
 List features = this.runtimeOptions.cucumberFeatures(this.resourceLoader);
 Formatter formatter = this.runtimeOptions.formatter(this.classLoader);
 Reporter reporter = this.runtimeOptions.reporter(this.classLoader);
 StepDefinitionReporter stepDefinitionReporter = this.runtimeOptions.stepDefinitionReporter(this.classLoader);
 this.glue.reportStepDefinitions(stepDefinitionReporter);
 Iterator var5 = features.iterator();
 while(var5.hasNext()) {
 CucumberFeature cucumberFeature = (CucumberFeature)var5.next();
 cucumberFeature.run(formatter, reporter, this);
 }
 formatter.done();
 formatter.close();
 this.printSummary();
 }