Sending error as JSON to the front-end using HttpServletResponse

Question

I am working on a REST backend and I have a requirement to send error information (messages together with custom application keys & codes) as JSON back to the front end.

I am not sure whether to include the JSON in the msg argument to the sendError method (from HttpServletResponse) as follows:

void sendError(int sc,
               java.lang.String msg)
               throws java.io.IOException

... or use the response's actual payload as follows:

response.getWriter().write(json);

Can anyone please advise as to which is the best way to proceed?

ddewaele · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-09 12:26:48Z

2

The sendError will set the content type to "text/html"and as such is not a good candidate for pushing custom json error messages to the client.

You're better off setting the statuscode yourself

response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);

and then writing the JSON string you want using the writer.

This is obviously very low-level. If you're using some kind of REST framework it typically has good support for automatically translation exceptions into a JSON format. That way you simply need to throw an exception and the framework will do the rest.

answered Sep 9, 2015 at 12:26

ddewaele

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2 Comments

balteo Over a year ago

Thanks for this reply! Do you have a specific framework in mind for avoiding the low level drudge?

ddewaele Over a year ago

Spring is pretty good. (basic tutorial at spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service). You can customize the exception handling by providing custom ExceptionHandlers (spring.io/blog/2013/11/01/exception-handling-in-spring-mvc)

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