How to handle exceptions in Spring MVC differently for HTML and JSON requests

Question

I'm using the following exception handler in Spring 4.0.3 to intercept exceptions and display a custom error page to the user:

@ControllerAdvice public class ExceptionHandlerController {     @ExceptionHandler(value = Exception.class)     public ModelAndView handleError(HttpServletRequest request, Exception e)     {         ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("/errors/500"));         mav.addObject("exception", e);         return mav;     } } 

But now I want a different handling for JSON requests so I get JSON error responses for this kind of requests when an exception occurred. Currently the above code is also triggered by JSON requests (Using an Accept: application/json header) and the JavaScript client doesn't like the HTML response.

How can I handle exceptions differently for HTML and JSON requests?

Answer 1

The ControllerAdvice annotation has an element/attribute called basePackage which can be set to determine which packages it should scan for Controllers and apply the advices. So, what you can do is to separate those Controllers handling normal requests and those handling AJAX requests into different packages then write 2 Exception Handling Controllers with appropriate ControllerAdvice annotations. For example:

@ControllerAdvice("com.acme.webapp.ajaxcontrollers") public class AjaxExceptionHandlingController { ... @ControllerAdvice("com.acme.webapp.controllers") public class ExceptionHandlingController {