Properly formatting REST response when encountering exception

[smitchelus]

Hi, I am trying to use @ResponseBody to facilitate marshaling of RESTful services (see code snippet below for example). However, I want to make sure that when an exception is encountered that the response is still in the requested format (JSON, XML, etc.). It appears that the default behavior renders a standard HTML error page.

Is there a recommended way to accomplish this? Since I haven't been able to find anything I have just written an aspect that catches any unhandled exceptions and returns our RestResponse class (see below). However, that results in a 200 response code which is obviously incorrect.

I feel like I'm probably headed down the wrong path here so thought I'd better ask to see if anyone has a recommendation about a better way to solve this problem.

Thanks,
Scott


Controller Method:

    @RequestMapping(value="{listId}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public @ResponseBody RestResponse getDatabase(@PathVariable("listId") Integer listId) {
        return new RestResponse(listOfLists.get(listId));
    }

Aspect:

    @Pointcut("execution(samples.mvc.ajax.account.RestResponse *(..))")
    public void anyRestMethodExecution() {}

    @Around("anyRestMethodExecution()")
      public Object handleRestErrors(ProceedingJoinPoint pjp) {
        try {
            return pjp.proceed();
        } catch (Throwable e) {
            return new RestResponse(RestResponse.StatusEnum.ERROR, e.getMessage());
        }
    }

[smitchelus]

Hi everyone, well it turns out this must have been considered a bug in 3.0. I upgraded my sample project to 3.1 and @ExceptionHandler now seems to work properly. So the following exception handler method now returns the appropriate response type.

    @ExceptionHandler(TypeMismatchException.class)
    public @ResponseBody RestResponse handleTypeMismatchException(TypeMismatchException e) {
        return new RestResponse(RestResponse.StatusEnum.ERROR, e.getMessage());
    }