Spring Resttemplate exception handling

Question

You want to create a class that implements ResponseErrorHandler and then use an instance of it to set the error handling of your rest template:

public class MyErrorHandler implements ResponseErrorHandler {
  @Override
  public void handleError(ClientHttpResponse response) throws IOException {
    // your error handling here
  }

  @Override
  public boolean hasError(ClientHttpResponse response) throws IOException {
     ...
  }
}

[...]

public static void main(String args[]) {
  RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
  restTemplate.setErrorHandler(new MyErrorHandler());
}

Also, Spring has the class DefaultResponseErrorHandler, which you can extend instead of implementing the interface, in case you only want to override the handleError method.

public class MyErrorHandler extends DefaultResponseErrorHandler {
  @Override
  public void handleError(ClientHttpResponse response) throws IOException {
    // your error handling here
  }
}

Take a look at its source code to have an idea of how Spring handles HTTP errors.

Spring cleverly treats http error codes as exceptions, and assumes that your exception handling code has the context to handle the error. To get exchange to function as you would expect it, do this:

    try {
        return restTemplate.exchange(url, httpMethod, httpEntity, String.class);
    } catch(HttpStatusCodeException e) {
        return ResponseEntity.status(e.getRawStatusCode()).headers(e.getResponseHeaders())
                .body(e.getResponseBodyAsString());
    }

This will return all the expected results from the response.

You should catch a HttpStatusCodeException exception:

try {
    restTemplate.exchange(...);
} catch (HttpStatusCodeException exception) {
    int statusCode = exception.getStatusCode().value();
    ...
}

Another solution is the one described here at the end of this post by "enlian": http://springinpractice.com/2013/10/07/handling-json-error-object-responses-with-springs-resttemplate

try{
     restTemplate.exchange(...)
} catch(HttpStatusCodeException e){
     String errorpayload = e.getResponseBodyAsString();
     //do whatever you want
} catch(RestClientException e){
     //no response payload, tell the user sth else 
}

Spring abstracts you from the very very very large list of http status code. That is the idea of the exceptions. Take a look into org.springframework.web.client.RestClientException hierarchy:

You have a bunch of classes to map the most common situations when dealing with http responses. The http codes list is really large, you won't want write code to handle each situation. But for example, take a look into the HttpClientErrorException sub-hierarchy. You have a single exception to map any 4xx kind of error. If you need to go deep, then you can. But with just catching HttpClientErrorException, you can handle any situation where bad data was provided to the service.

The DefaultResponseErrorHandler is really simple and solid. If the response status code is not from the family of 2xx, it just returns true for the hasError method.

I have handled this as below:

try {
  response = restTemplate.postForEntity(requestUrl, new HttpEntity<>(requestBody, headers), String.class);
} catch (HttpStatusCodeException ex) {
  response = new ResponseEntity<String>(ex.getResponseBodyAsString(), ex.getResponseHeaders(), ex.getStatusCode());
}