Send Status code and message in SpringMVC

Question

I have the following code in my web application:

@ExceptionHandler(InstanceNotFoundException.class)
    @ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.NO_CONTENT)
    public ModelAndView instanceNotFoundException(InstanceNotFoundException e) {
        return returnErrorPage(message, e);
    }

Is it possible to also append a status message to the response? I need to add some additional semantics for my errors, like in the case of the snippet I posted I would like to append which class was the element of which the instance was not found.

Is this even possible?

EDIT: I tried this:

@ResponseStatus(value=HttpStatus.NO_CONTENT, reason="My message")

But then when I try to get this message in the client, it's not set.

      URL u = new URL ( url);
        HttpURLConnection huc =  (HttpURLConnection) u.openConnection();
        huc.setRequestMethod("GET");
        HttpURLConnection.setFollowRedirects(true);
        huc.connect();
        final int code = huc.getResponseCode();
        String message = huc.getResponseMessage();

MichelReap · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-05 08:38:21Z

2

Turns out I needed to activate custom messages on Tomcat using this parameter:

-Dorg.apache.coyote.USE_CUSTOM_STATUS_MSG_IN_HEADER=true

answered Dec 5, 2013 at 8:38

MichelReap

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1 Comment

rakesh Over a year ago

how did you set this parameter with embedded tomcat in spring boot??

vijay · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-05 10:01:42Z

1

The message can be in the body rather than in header. Similar to a successful method, set the response (text, json, xml..) to be returned, but set the http status to an error value. I have found that to be more useful than the custom message in header. The following example shows the response with a custom header and a message in body. A ModelAndView that take to another page will also be conceptually similar.

@ExceptionHandler(InstanceNotFoundException.class)
public ResponseEntity<String> handle() {
    HttpHeaders responseHeaders = new HttpHeaders();
    responseHeaders.set("ACustomHttpHeader", "The custom value");
    return new ResponseEntity<String>("the error message", responseHeaders, HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
}

answered Dec 5, 2013 at 10:01

vijay

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2 Comments

MichelReap Over a year ago

The probem is, I need to know what caused the error without actually getting the response body.

vijay Over a year ago

Sure, as shown above you could just add a new header in the response and not the response body. Will work consistently across app servers and need not change the default behaviour.

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