What is the replacement for Spring's deprecated NoSuchRequestHandlingMethodException?

Question

The NoSuchRequestHandlingMethodException was deprecated in Spring 4.3, in favor of annotation-driven handler methods. What does this mean? The exception is still listed in the documentation, without mentioning its deprecated status. If I understand correctly, this exception is thrown when there is no request mapper for a given request. It appears to be handled by the DefaultExceptionHandlerResolver, here, and the relevant method has been deprecated as well.

If this method is deprecated, can I assume Spring does not throw this exception anymore? How am I supposed to replace this functionality with annotation-driven exception handling? Which exception am I supposed to handle, if this one is deprecated?

Side note: I also noticed a newer NoHandlerFoundException, here. Is this a replacement? If so, why? It appears to do the same thing. And why are the exceptions related to other HTTP status codes not deprecated? It all doesn't make a lot of sense.

Answer 1

The NoSuchRequestHandlingMethodException exception is part of the multiaction package that has been deprecated in Spring: https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/2.5.x/javadoc-api/org/springframework/web/servlet/mvc/multiaction/class-use/NoSuchRequestHandlingMethodException.html

If you don't use multiactions, you can safely get rid of that catch statement and/or stop trying to catch and handle that exception. For example, some "Exception-to-Response error handlers" sample code might look like this to try and catch cases when the dispatcher doesn't find a proper mapping:

   @ControllerAdvice
public class RestErrorHandler {

  @ExceptionHandler({FileNotFoundException.class, NoSuchRequestHandlingMethodException.class})
  @ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND)
  @ResponseBody
  public ErrorInfo process404(HttpServletRequest req, Exception ex) {
    return handleException(req, HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND, ex);
  }
}

But the latest dispatcher (non-multiaction) will never throw such an exception, so you could simply get rid of the NoSuchRequestHandlingMethodException and, instead, handle the NoHandlerFoundException (which is not thrown by default, but you can configure the spring dispatcher to throw it IF you really need to, because, by default, the dispatcher already returns a 404).