How to set HTTP status code in JSP error handlers

Question

I have a JSP page (in Tomcat) which uses JSP Tags to retrieve some data. But these JSP Tags can throw exceptions (For example when parameter values are invalid). Now I want to implement a nicer error handling for these situation. I failed to find a way to GLOBALLY specify an exception handler (error-page definitions in web.xml don't work for exceptions thrown in a JSP). The only way I found so far is specifiying an errorPage attribute in the page header of ALL JSP-files.

<% page errorPage="/WEB-INF/jsp/errors/500.jsp" %>

Quite annoying to do this for ALL JSPs, but acceptable. But not acceptable is the fact that the error page is always delivered with a HTTP status code of 200. I want a 500 instead. I tried using a servlet as errorPage instead of a JSP and tried to set response.setStatus(500) and also response.sendError(500) but both calls seems to be ignored. So this code prints "200" two times and I have no idea why:

System.out.println(response.getStatus());
response.setStatus(500);
System.out.println(response.getStatus());

So the question is: How can I set the HTTP status code in JSP error handlers?

Answer 1

You can configure your error pages in web.xml.

<error-page>
        <error-code>
            500
        </error-code>
        <location>
            /500.jsp
        </location>
    </error-page>

in your 500.jsp, set the directive as <%@ page isErrorPage="true" %>

Answer 2

Instead of setStatus(500), you'd better use sendError(500) - there are some differences. The config in web.xml works fine with sendError, however, if you don't want the config in web.xml, error-page from page directive worked just for exceptions for me, not for HTTP error codes.