Exceptions

See equivalent in the Reactive stack

If an exception occurs during request mapping or is thrown from a request handler (such as a @Controller), the DispatcherServlet delegates to a chain of HandlerExceptionResolver beans to resolve the exception and provide alternative handling, which is typically an error response.

The following table lists the available HandlerExceptionResolver implementations:

Table 1. HandlerExceptionResolver implementations
HandlerExceptionResolver Description

SimpleMappingExceptionResolver

A mapping between exception class names and error view names. Useful for rendering error pages in a browser application.

DefaultHandlerExceptionResolver

Resolves exceptions raised by Spring MVC and maps them to HTTP status codes. See also alternative ResponseEntityExceptionHandler and Error Responses.

ResponseStatusExceptionResolver

Resolves exceptions with the @ResponseStatus annotation and maps them to HTTP status codes based on the value in the annotation.

ExceptionHandlerExceptionResolver

Resolves exceptions by invoking an @ExceptionHandler method in a @Controller or a @ControllerAdvice class. See @ExceptionHandler methods.

Chain of Resolvers

You can form an exception resolver chain by declaring multiple HandlerExceptionResolver beans in your Spring configuration and setting their order properties as needed. The higher the order property, the later the exception resolver is positioned.

The contract of HandlerExceptionResolver specifies that it can return:

  • a ModelAndView that points to an error view.

  • An empty ModelAndView if the exception was handled within the resolver.

  • null if the exception remains unresolved, for subsequent resolvers to try, and, if the exception remains at the end, it is allowed to bubble up to the Servlet container.

The MVC Config automatically declares built-in resolvers for default Spring MVC exceptions, for @ResponseStatus annotated exceptions, and for support of @ExceptionHandler methods. You can customize that list or replace it.

Container Error Page

If an exception remains unresolved by any HandlerExceptionResolver and is, therefore, left to propagate or if the response status is set to an error status (that is, 4xx, 5xx), Servlet containers can render a default error page in HTML. To customize the default error page of the container, you can declare an error page mapping in web.xml. The following example shows how to do so:

<error-page>
	<location>/error</location>
</error-page>

Given the preceding example, when an exception bubbles up or the response has an error status, the Servlet container makes an ERROR dispatch within the container to the configured URL (for example, /error). This is then processed by the DispatcherServlet, possibly mapping it to a @Controller, which could be implemented to return an error view name with a model or to render a JSON response, as the following example shows:

  • Java

  • Kotlin

@RestController
public class ErrorController {

	@RequestMapping(path = "/error")
	public Map<String, Object> handle(HttpServletRequest request) {
		Map<String, Object> map = new HashMap<>();
		map.put("status", request.getAttribute("jakarta.servlet.error.status_code"));
		map.put("reason", request.getAttribute("jakarta.servlet.error.message"));
		return map;
	}
}
@RestController
class ErrorController {

	@RequestMapping(path = ["/error"])
	fun handle(request: HttpServletRequest): Map<String, Any> {
		val map = HashMap<String, Any>()
		map["status"] = request.getAttribute("jakarta.servlet.error.status_code")
		map["reason"] = request.getAttribute("jakarta.servlet.error.message")
		return map
	}
}
The Servlet API does not provide a way to create error page mappings in Java. You can, however, use both a WebApplicationInitializer and a minimal web.xml.