CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jaxbjerseyglassfish-3
user432024
user432024

Reputation: 4665

Custom error messages for Jersey/JAXB XML validation errors

So I have a REST service setup with Jersey.

My POJO is simply annotated as @XmlRootElement

I send a POST request to my REST service and everything works fine.

1- I send malformed XML to the service I get back the containers default 400 Bad Request page. Using Glassfish 3 I can't remember exactly but I know I can change or tell my web app to map to my own 400 bad request right? Where can I look for docs on that specific subject.

2- I send valid XML but in one of the expected fields I put empty value. My service tries to do something and it throws a persistence exception. I get back the containers default 500 Internal Server Error page and it list the exception thrown. I guess I can map to my own custom error page as well, but I do not just want to show the exception message. This is considered a security issue.

I would basically like to validate the fields myself based on my business logic and return back to the client an error message such as "Field1 is invalid" Nothing more nothing less. And the client should be able to parse the error code and also know which field was wrong.

Also what can I do when my service has more then one type of bad request error? For instance, the field can expect an INT value between 1-3, but specific business request expects value of 2 and a 3 is sent.

So for type/value validation I want to simply say "Invalid field name here". But for specific business logic say for instance "Invalid account" or "Account Expired" or "Address Does Not Match" etc...

Or how about when I have more then 1 success code?

Basically I'm taking an old "xml" type service and converting to REST style for proof of concept and bring it up to standards. The old one pretty much is 100% POST even when "querying for results. I.e: GET. So basically you POST to it XML, it reads the XML, calls the business logic and logic returns appropriate code in the XML response. So everything is HTTP 200 OK and the business logic code is returned in an XML response. So the only time a client gets a 500 error is when there is hard failure where the service can't produce an XML response. Even invalid XML is returned as 200 OK, but the XML response back indicates this with my own errors codes.

A while back I was suggested I use SOAP for more "message" oriented services, but I still think it's to heavy and I can achieve with REST what my service does, even though I don't need most of REST?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2447

Answers (1)

Martin Matula
Martin Matula

Reputation: 7989

You can map exceptions to HTTP responses using ExceptionMappers - see: http://jersey.java.net/nonav/documentation/1.11/jax-rs.html#d4e433 http://jsr311.java.net/nonav/releases/1.1/javax/ws/rs/ext/ExceptionMapper.html

If you want to do validation before the request even reaches the resource method, you can try writing a ContainerRequestFilter for that and throw a WebApplicationException which takes Response as a parameter - jersey automatically maps that exception to the response it was initialized with.

Upvotes: 3

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