Where can I catch non rest controller exceptions in spring?

Question

I have the spring mvc application. To catch exceptions I use @ExceptionHandler annotation.

@ControllerAdvise
public class ExceptionHandlerController {   

    @ExceptionHandler(CustomGenericException.class)
    public ModelAndView handleCustomException(CustomGenericException ex) {
            ....
    }
}

But I think that I will catch only exceptions after controller methods invocations.

But how to catch exceptions generated outside the rest context? For example lifecycle callbacks or scheduled tasks.

Answer 1

But how to catch exceptions generated outside the rest context? For example lifecycle callbacks or scheduled tasks

One solution that I can think of it, is to use a After Throwing Advice. The basic idea is to define an advice that would caught exceptions thrown by some beans and handle them appropriately.

For example, you could define a custom annotation like:

@Target({ElementType.METHOD})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface Handled {}

And use that annotation to mark methods that should be advised. Then you can annotate your, say, jobs with this annotation:

@Component
public class SomeJob {
    @Handled
    @Scheduled(fixedRate = 5000)
    public void doSomething() {
        if (Math.random() < 0.5)
            throw new RuntimeException();

        System.out.println("I escaped!");
    }
}

And finally define an advice that handles exceptions thrown by methods annotated with @Handled:

@Aspect
@Component
public class ExceptionHandlerAspect {
    @Pointcut("@annotation(com.so.Handled)")
    public void handledMethods() {}

    @AfterThrowing(pointcut = "handledMethods()", throwing = "ex")
    public void handleTheException(Exception ex) {
        // Do something useful
        ex.printStackTrace();
    }
}

For more finer grain control over method executions, you could use Around Advice, too. Also don't forget to enable autoproxy-ing, using @EnableAspectJAutoProxy on a Java config or <aop:aspectj-autoproxy/> in XML configurations.