Global Exception Handling Using ControllerAdvice And ExceptionHandler Annotation

Posted By : Shakil Pathan | 31-May-2018

Java

In this blog, I am going to explain you about how to handle global exception from your controllers in your spring web application. Spring provides @ControllerAdvice annotation which allows you to write some global code which can be applied to the controllers in your web application. This annotation will apply, by default, to all the classes with the @Controller annotation (which extends to @RestController). You can configure it to use multiple packages those can also be chosen by following the below process:

@ControllerAdvice("my.package")
@ControllerAdvice(value = "my.package")
@ControllerAdvice(basePackages = "my.package")

@ControllerAdvice annotation's basePackageClasses property provides another way to specify a package, which will enable this to all the controllers inside the package that the class lives in:

@ControllerAdvice(basePackageClasses = MyClass.class)

you can also apply it to controllers with certain annotations:

@ControllerAdvice(annotations = Controller.class)

@ExceptionHandler, as the name suggests, allow you to define a method that handles exceptions. If you are not using the @ControllerAdvice annotation, then the code for handling those exceptions would be in the controller itself, which obviously add some duplication and clutter to the class. By using @ControllerAdvice along with @ExceptionHandler allows you to prevent this by providing globle error handling and more specifically.

@ControllerAdvice
public class GlobalExceptionHandler {
	public ResponseEntity<object> handleInternal(final CustomException ex, final WebRequest request) {
		String body = "Entity not found.";
		return new ResponseEntity<object>(body, new HttpHeaders(), HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND);
	}
}

Using @ControllerAdvice and @ExceptionHandler, a custom response is returned (so the stacktrace not found anymore).

Hope, It helps you to understanding the concept.

Thanks,