Catching exceptions from a Jersey REST client thrown from a Spring MVC Rest service

Question

I implemented a REST application using Spring MVC, Jersey and JAXB. The client sends a `ServiceRequest` object which contains information about the request and receives a `ServiceResponse` object back with information about the response. ServiceRequest ``` @XmlRootElement(name = "servicerequest") public class ServiceRequest{ String serviceName = "AddUser" public String getServiceName() { return serviceName; } @XmlElement public void setServiceName(String serviceName) { this.serviceName = name; } } ``` ServiceResponse ``` @XmlRootElement(name = "serviceresponse") public class ServiceResponse { String responseCode; public String getResponseCode() { return responseCode; } @XmlElement public void setResponseCode(String code) { this.responseCode = name; } } ``` The client makes the call to the service using Jersey ServiceClient ``` ClientConfig config = new DefaultClientConfig(); Client client = Client.create(config); WebResource service = client.resource(RESOURCE_URL); ServiceRequest requ…

Accepted Answer

`@ExceptionHandler` annotation can take an array of classes as a parameter, so you can create only one (or more) handlers for multiple exceptions. Change the method signature to take the common ancestor of all handled exception classes as a parameter. Something along the lines:

```
@ExceptionHandler(value = {NullPointerException.class, AnotherException.class})
@ResponseBody
public String handleException1(Exception ex) {
    return ex.getMessage();
}
```

In your case it'll be `String`, since you annotated it with `@ResponseBody`, but you probably want to change the returned http code to some error code. You can do it by adding

```
@ResponseStatus(value = HttpStatus.WHATEVER_CODE_YOU_WANT, reason = "Your message")` 
```

annotation to your exception handler.

In case when http code returned by the call is greater or equal than `300`, jersey client throws `UniformInterfaceException`. You can catch and handle it. The response type doesn't matter in this case, as the exception is thrown before the conversion.

update

Once you get a hold of `UniformInterfaceException` and change the exception handler on the server so it returns `ServiceResponse` as response body, then you can get the reponse using:

```
ServiceResponse response = uniformInterfaceException.getResponse().getEntity(ServiceResponse.class);
```

Catching exceptions from a Jersey REST client thrown from a Spring MVC Rest service

Solution

Problem