Returning JSON or XML for Exceptions in Jersey
- by Dominic
My goal is to have an error bean returned on a 404 with a descriptive message when a object is not found, and return the same MIME type that was requested.
I have a look up resource, which will return the specified object in XML or JSON based on the URI (I have setup the com.sun.jersey.config.property.resourceConfigClass servlet parameter so I dont need the Accept header. My JAXBContextResolver has the ErrorBean.class in its list of types, and the correct JAXBContext is returned for this class because I can see in the logs).
eg: http://foobar.com/rest/locations/1.json
@GET
@Path("{id}")
@Produces({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON, MediaType.APPLICATION_XML})
public Location getCustomer(@PathParam("id") int cId) {
//look up location from datastore
....
if (location == null) {
throw new NotFoundException("Location" + cId + " is not found");
}
}
And my NotFoundException looks like this:
public class NotFoundException extends WebApplicationException {
public NotFoundException(String message) {
super(Response.status(Response.Status.NOT_FOUND).
entity(new
ErrorBean(
message,
Response.Status.NOT_FOUND.getStatusCode()
)
.build());
}
}
The ErrorBean is as follows:
@XmlRootElement(name = "error")
public class ErrorBean {
private String errorMsg;
private int errorCode;
//no-arg constructor, property constructor, getter and setters
...
}
However, I'm always getting a 204 No Content response when I try this. I have hacked around, and if I return a string and specify the mime type this works fine:
public NotFoundException(String message) {
super(Response.status(Response.Status.NOT_FOUND).
entity(message).type("text/plain").build());
}
I have also tried returning an ErrorBean as a resource. This works fine:
{"errorCode":404,"errorMsg":"Location 1 is not found!"}
