@RestControllerAdvice vs @ControllerAdvice

Question

• What are the major difference between @RestControllerAdvice and @ControllerAdvice ??
• Is it we should always use @RestControllerAdvice for rest services and @ControllerAdvice MVC ?

Answer 1

@RestControllerAdvice is just a syntactic sugar for @ControllerAdvice + @ResponseBody, you can look here.

Is it we should always use @RestControllerAdvice for rest services and @ControllerAdvice MVC?

Again, as mentioned above, @ControllerAdvice can be used even for REST web services as well, but you need to additionally use @ResponseBody.

Answer 2

In addition, we can just understand it as:

@RestControler = @Controller + @ResponseBody

@RestControllerAdvice = @ControllerAdvice + @ResponseBody.

Keeping in mind that @RestControllerAdvice is more convenient annotation for handling Exception with RestfulApi.

Example os usage:

@RestControllerAdvice public class WebRestControllerAdvice {      @ExceptionHandler(CustomNotFoundException.class)   public ResponseMsg handleNotFoundException(CustomNotFoundException ex) {     ResponseMsg responseMsg = new ResponseMsg(ex.getMessage());     return responseMsg;   } } 

In that case any exception instanceOf CustomNotFoundException will be thrown in body of response.

Example extracted here: https://grokonez.com/spring-framework/spring-mvc/use-restcontrolleradvice-new-features-spring-framework-4-3