jQuery Ajax error handling, show custom exception messages

Question

Make sure you're setting Response.StatusCode to something other than 200. Write your exception's message using Response.Write, then use...

xhr.responseText

..in your javascript.

Controller:

public class ClientErrorHandler : FilterAttribute, IExceptionFilter
{
    public void OnException(ExceptionContext filterContext)
    {
        var response = filterContext.RequestContext.HttpContext.Response;
        response.Write(filterContext.Exception.Message);
        response.ContentType = MediaTypeNames.Text.Plain;
        filterContext.ExceptionHandled = true;
    }
}

[ClientErrorHandler]
public class SomeController : Controller
{
    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult SomeAction()
    {
        throw new Exception("Error message");
    }
}

View script:

$.ajax({
    type: "post", url: "/SomeController/SomeAction",
    success: function (data, text) {
        //...
    },
    error: function (request, status, error) {
        alert(request.responseText);
    }
});

ServerSide:

     doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response){ 
            try{ //logic
            }catch(ApplicationException exception){ 
               response.setStatus(400);
               response.getWriter().write(exception.getMessage());
               //just added semicolon to end of line

           }
 }

ClientSide:

 jQuery.ajax({// just showing error property
           error: function(jqXHR,error, errorThrown) {  
               if(jqXHR.status&&jqXHR.status==400){
                    alert(jqXHR.responseText); 
               }else{
                   alert("Something went wrong");
               }
          }
    }); 

Generic Ajax Error Handling

If I need to do some generic error handling for all the ajax requests. I will set the ajaxError handler and display the error on a div named errorcontainer on the top of html content.

$("div#errorcontainer")
    .ajaxError(
        function(e, x, settings, exception) {
            var message;
            var statusErrorMap = {
                '400' : "Server understood the request, but request content was invalid.",
                '401' : "Unauthorized access.",
                '403' : "Forbidden resource can't be accessed.",
                '500' : "Internal server error.",
                '503' : "Service unavailable."
            };
            if (x.status) {
                message =statusErrorMap[x.status];
                                if(!message){
                                      message="Unknown Error \n.";
                                  }
            }else if(exception=='parsererror'){
                message="Error.\nParsing JSON Request failed.";
            }else if(exception=='timeout'){
                message="Request Time out.";
            }else if(exception=='abort'){
                message="Request was aborted by the server";
            }else {
                message="Unknown Error \n.";
            }
            $(this).css("display","inline");
            $(this).html(message);
                 });

You need to convert the responseText to JSON. Using JQuery:

jsonValue = jQuery.parseJSON( jqXHR.responseText );
console.log(jsonValue.Message);