Handling exceptions in Spring Web Services

**sws123** · Jun 16th, 2008, 07:42 AM

How do we handle exceptions (specially Parsing exceptions) in Spring Web Services?

1. For example, Spring WS distribution has a sample application called 'pox'.

2. If the POX request send to the 'ContactCountEndpoint' has a syntax error, it will got thrown as SAXParse exception and client will get something like this:

HTML Code:

<html>
   <head>
      <title>Apache Tomcat/6.0.16 - Error report</title>
      <style>
         <!--H1 {font-family:Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;color:white;background-color:#525D76;font-size:22px;} H2 {font-family:Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;color:white;background-color:#525D76;font-size:16px;} H3 {font-family:Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;color:white;background-color:#525D76;font-size:14px;} BODY {font-family:Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;color:black;background-color:white;} B {font-family:Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;color:white;background-color:#525D76;} P {font-family:Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;background:white;color:black;font-size:12px;}A {color : black;}A.name {color : black;}HR {color : #525D76;}--></style> 
      </head>
      <body>
         <h1>HTTP Status 500 - </h1>
         <HR size="1" noshade="noshade">
            <p>
               <b>type</b> Exception report
            </p>
            <p>
               <b>message</b> 
               <u></u>
            </p>
            <p>
               <b>description</b> 
               <u>The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.</u>
            </p>
            <p>
               <b>exception</b> 
               <pre>org.springframework.web.util.NestedServletException: Request processing failed; nested exception is org.springframework.ws.pox.dom.DomPoxMessageException: Could not parse request message; nested exception is org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The element type &quot;contact&quot; must be terminated by the matching end-tag &quot;&lt;/contact&gt;&quot;.	org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:583)	org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doPost(FrameworkServlet.java:511)	javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:710)	javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:803)</pre>
            </p>
            <p>
               <b>root cause</b> 
               <pre>org.springframework.ws.pox.dom.DomPoxMessageException: Could not parse request message; nested exception is org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The element type &quot;contact&quot; must be terminated by the matching end-tag &quot;&lt;/contact&gt;&quot;.	org.springframework.ws.pox.dom.DomPoxMessageFactory.createWebServiceMessage(DomPoxMessageFactory.java:94)	org.springframework.ws.transport.AbstractWebServiceConnection.receive(AbstractWebServiceConnection.java:86)	org.springframework.ws.transport.support.WebServiceMessageReceiverObjectSupport.handleConnection(WebServiceMessageReceiverObjectSupport.java:86)	org.springframework.ws.transport.http.WebServiceMessageReceiverHandlerAdapter.handle(WebServiceMessageReceiverHandlerAdapter.java:57)	org.springframework.ws.transport.http.MessageDispatcherServlet.doService(MessageDispatcherServlet.java:197)	org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:571)	org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doPost(FrameworkServlet.java:511)	javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:710)	javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:803)</pre>
            </p>
            <p>
               <b>root cause</b> 
               <pre>org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The element type &quot;contact&quot; must be terminated by the matching end-tag &quot;&lt;/contact&gt;&quot;.	com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.DOMParser.parse(Unknown Source)	com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(Unknown Source)	javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.parse(Unknown Source)	org.springframework.ws.pox.dom.DomPoxMessageFactory.createWebServiceMessage(DomPoxMessageFactory.java:87)	org.springframework.ws.transport.AbstractWebServiceConnection.receive(AbstractWebServiceConnection.java:86)	org.springframework.ws.transport.support.WebServiceMessageReceiverObjectSupport.handleConnection(WebServiceMessageReceiverObjectSupport.java:86)	org.springframework.ws.transport.http.WebServiceMessageReceiverHandlerAdapter.handle(WebServiceMessageReceiverHandlerAdapter.java:57)	org.springframework.ws.transport.http.MessageDispatcherServlet.doService(MessageDispatcherServlet.java:197)	org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:571)	org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doPost(FrameworkServlet.java:511)
	javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:710)
	javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:803)
</pre>
            </p>
            <p>
               <b>note</b> 
               <u>The full stack trace of the root cause is available in the Apache Tomcat/6.0.16 logs.</u>
            </p>
            <HR size="1" noshade="noshade">
               <h3>Apache Tomcat/6.0.16</h3>
            </body>
         </html>

3. Now to prevent this kind of response being sent to the client, I wrote a

Code:

public class ResolveParsingException extends AbstractEndpointExceptionResolver 
	
	private DocumentBuilderFactory documentBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
	
	 protected final boolean resolveExceptionInternal(MessageContext messageContext, Object endpoint, Exception ex) 
{
}

4. And we declare this class in the application context:

HTML Code:

<bean id="exceptionResolver"
    	class="ResolveParsingException ">
    </bean>

5. But the problem is SAXParse exception is not handed over to this class, it still gets thrown as shown in #2. If we throw a new 'java.lang.Exception' from 'ContactCountEndpoint', then this 'ResolveParsingException' get sthe chance to resolve it.

6. Unfortunately there is not enough information available in Spring WS about handling exceptions, so couldn't resolve this issue based on the available information in reference documentation.

7. Would appreciate if some one could give a pointer, how to catch these 'SAXParse' exceptions nicely and return a XML response back to client, e.g.,

HTML Code:

<contacts>
 <error>Invalid XML</error>
</contacts>

8. Also how do we set this response message in exception resolver?
i. We create a DOMPoxMesasge
ii. and set it as a response to MessageContext?
messageContext.setResponse(domPoxMessage);

9. A small sample exception resolver class which shows how to handle, this will be of great help and also useful for future help for other people.

Thanks!

**sws123** · Jun 16th, 2008, 03:38 PM

Hello, can somebody please suggest solution to this problem?

How do we catch 'SAXParseExceptions' nicely and return an XML response back to client using ExceptionResolvers or any other way?

I have wrote an ExceptionResolver as mentioned in the post above, but for some reasons (perhaps a bug), SAXParseException is not passed to it. So eventually the whole stack trace ends up being sent on the client side.

Thanks for the help!

**Arjen Poutsma** · Jun 17th, 2008, 05:32 AM

If the XML sent to the service is invalid, there is very little you can do.

**sws123** · Jun 17th, 2008, 06:32 AM

Thanks a lot Arjen for your kind reply!

I believe the applications using the Spring WS should have the chance to decide what to send back as response, instead of Spring WS sending back the stack trace to the client.

If lets say the web service is SOAP based istead of POX (Plain Old XML) like the case in this post, then the SOAP server will send a SOAP Fault message back to the client, not the whole Stack trace.

Ideally in this case as well, the web service should have the chance to send a custom XML message containing the error message back to the client, e.g.,

HTML Code:

<contacts>
 <error>Invalid XML</error>
</contacts>

Should this be a feature request for Spring WS?

Any comments?

Thanks!

**sivaram@spring** · Oct 8th, 2008, 06:38 PM

Hi All,

Anyone has solution to this problem? Your help will be appreciated.

Thanks!

**walnutmon** · Aug 11th, 2010, 12:47 PM

I'm using spring 2.5 and the most recent version of Spring-WS, is this problem ever going to be resolved? This is a huge problem because as I've searched for solutions to this, there is no way to resolve this kind of an exception in any way, and the client will get a full stack trace seeing "springframework" throughout the whole thing.

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