Rest service throws exception : Best way to handle

Question

I have a rest service which will throw an exception and I want to know what will be the best way to handle this.

So I have a rest service which can throw a userdefined exception and I am catching that inside the catch block and throwing that exception again ! and using rest framework to catch that. Similarly for non-user defined exceptions. I thought this will be good as I have number of rest services and all userdefinedexception code handling will be at a same place.

I would like to know is this the proper way of handling exception in rest service ?

I am using jersey.


// rest service 
@POST
public void doSomething() {

try {
// ... some piece of code that can throw user defined exception as well as runtime exception
} catch(UserDefinedException e) {
throws new UserDefinedException(e);
} catch(Exception e) {
throws new ServiceException(e);
} 

// Now I have a @Provider to catch this thrown exception 

@Provider
public class UserDefinedExceptionHandler implements
        ExceptionMapper {

    public Response toResponse(UserDefinedException exception) {
        ClientResponse clientResponse = new          ClientResponse();
        ResponseStatus status = new ResponseStatus();

        clientResponse = handleUserDefinedException(exception, status, clientResponse);

        return Response.ok(clientResponse).build();
    }

// similarly for the ServiceException

hamilton.lima hamilton.lima · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-09T16:42:45

Just raising error 500 at the server don't give much details on the error, one way to gracefully handle errors, is to wrap the response data in a structure with status and data, if the status is error, show the correct message.

something like this in json format :

{
    "status": "error",
    "data": {
        "message": "detailed error message"
    }
}

Rest service throws exception : Best way to handle

2 Answers