Why Spring MVC does not allow to expose Model or BindingResult to an @ExceptionHandler?

Question

Situation

I'm trying to group the code that logs the exceptions and render a nice view in a few methods. At the moment the logic is sometime in the @RequestHandler itself (in the a catch block), othertimes is delegated to an utility class (that works but moves the logic away from the place where the exception is thrown).

Spring's @ExceptionHandler seemed the way to group everything in one place (the controller itself or a parent) and get rid of some code (no need to put logic in the try-catch and no need for an utility class)... until I realized that an @ExceptionHandler methods won't have the ModelMap or BindingResult parameters autowired. Currently those objects are used to render the view with a sensible error message and we want to log some information contained in these objects as well.

Question

Why Spring doesn't not support method arguments such ModelMap or BindingResult for the @ExceptionHandler? What is the rationale behind it?

Possible solution

In the Spring source code (3.0.5) the arguments for the method are resolved in the HandlerMethodInvoker.invokeHandlerMethod. A an exception thrown by the request handler is caught there and re-thrown. The @ExceptionHandler and it's parameters are resolved elsewhere. As a workaround I thought to check if the Exception implements an hypothetical "ModelAware" or "BindingResultAware" interface, and in that case set Model and BindingResult attributes before re-throwhing it. How does it sound?

Answer 1

As stated before you can raise an exception wrapping a binding result object in some method of your controller:

    if (bindingResult.hasErrors()) {
        logBindingErrors(bindingResult);
        //return "users/create";
        // Exception handling happens later in this controller
        throw new BindingErrorsException("MVC binding errors", userForm, bindingResult);
    }

With your exception defined as illustrated here:

public class BindingErrorsException extends RuntimeException {
    private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(BindingErrorsException.class); 
    private static final long serialVersionUID = -7882202987868263849L;

    private final UserForm userForm;
    private final BindingResult bindingResult;

    public BindingErrorsException(
        final String message, 
        final UserForm userForm, 
        final BindingResult bindingResult
    ) {
        super(message);
        this.userForm = userForm;
        this.bindingResult = bindingResult;

        log.error(getLocalizedMessage());
    }

    public UserForm getUserForm() {
        return userForm;
    }

    public BindingResult getBindingResult() {
        return bindingResult;
    }
}

Next you just have to extract the required information from the raised then caught exception. Here assuming you have a suitable exception handler defined on your controller. It might be in a controller advice instead or even elewhere. See the Spring documentation for suitable and appropriate locations.

@ExceptionHandler(BindingErrorsException.class)
public ModelAndView bindingErrors(
    final HttpServletResponse resp, 
    final Exception ex
) {
    if(ex instanceof BindingErrorsException) {
        final BindingErrorsException bex = (BindingErrorsException) ex;
        final ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("users/create", bex.getBindingResult().getModel());
        mav.addObject("user", bex.getUserForm());
        return mav;
    } else {
        final ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("users/create");
        return mav;            
    }
}