Brief follow-up to Spring MVC, JSR 303 Validation, and WebSphere.

Wanting to improve on the default error messages. The article Spring From the Trenches: Adding Validation to a REST API was a detailed help. Error Handling for REST with Spring also provides a succinct overview of the different approaches.

For me, adding an @ExceptionHandler method to an existing common base Controller class was an easy, straightforward option.

    @ExceptionHandler(MethodArgumentNotValidException.class)  
    public ResponseEntity<Object> processValidationError(MethodArgumentNotValidException e) {

        List<ErrorResponse> errors = new ArrayList<>();

        for (FieldError f: e.getBindingResult().getFieldErrors()) {  
            errors.add(new ErrorResponse(400, f.getField() + ": " + f.getDefaultMessage()));  
        }

        return ResponseEntity.status(400).body(errors);  
    }

Where ErrorResponse is a POJO I defined that has int code and String message fields.

(I’m still deciding whether to always return a List, whether to use the same 400 code for each error as for the overall response, etc. I think I might switch the “code” to String with the field name. Best-practice opinions and pointers welcome, but that’s not the point of this post.)

Which can generate a response like:

[  
      {  
      "code": 400,  
      "message": "applicationId: Application ID must be between 1 and 30 characters"  
   },  
      {  
      "code": 400,  
      "message": "businessUnit: Business Unit is required"  
   }  
]