Exception handling in spring - spring

I am developing web application with spring + hibernate. As per my knowledge, it is best practice to put #transactional in service layer. Spring throws DataAccessException in case of any exception while updating data into database.
Below is my high level class structure.
#Transactional
class OrderService {
public void createOrder() {
try {
orderDAO.createOrder();
} catch (DataAccessException e) {
// convert into business exception and sends back to presentation logic.
}
}
}
What happens here is data access exception is thrown only after completion of method. so if any exception occurs, I am not able to convert it into business exception in catch block.
Work around is to flush the hibernate session in dao method but I do not like this approach. Is there any better approach to this?

I presume you are using Spring MVC, although you do not specify. If you are using Spring MVC, then there are a few different options.
You can create a Filter that looks for the DAE exception and recodes it to be a different status or exception that your front end would better understand. You can look at Spring Security's ExceptionTranslationFilter as an example of how this is already done for different exceptions
You can use a SimpleMappingExceptionResolver to map a specific exception to a particular view. This would allow your presentation layer to be agnostic and not need to know anything about the exception thrown.
You can use an #ExceptionHandler within a specific controller to handle the DAE exception in a general manner and appropriately prepare something for the presentation layer.
As an extension to #3, you can use a #ControllerAdvice to manage all DAE exceptions for any controllers in the webapp.
You can read about Exception Handling in Spring MVC for more details as well.
Generally speaking, I find that the best solution is to catch transaction exceptions at a much higher level and manipulate the information to present it to the front end in a way that is back-end agnostic. This allows you to set up your own error codes/etc. The only time I try/catch exceptions in my service itself is if I actually want to attempt a retry or modify the logic flow based on some specific exception and don't want the front end to know about it.

Related

Spring controller exception handling locally and globally

I would like some advice on how to achieve the following. I'm not providing code, as my problem is theoretical, but upon request I can. So this is the situation:
I have multiple controllers, each can throw XYException
I have a #ControllerAdvice class, in which I have an #ExceptionHandler watching for XYExceptions. When it happens, it prints out "XY".
In one (and only one) controller, when XYException is thrown, I want to do some additional task (let's say, do something that only that controller can do), and then I want the exception to be "passed on" to the global handler mentioned above.
I know I can catch the exception, do the desired task in catch block, and then re-throw the exception so the global handler can catch it, but what if I have 23 methods in the controller potentially throwing XYExceptions, and I do not want to put try-catch blocks in all 23 methods.
What is the clean Spring way of achieving this?
You could use AOP to achieve that. You'd write a method that intercepts the method inside that controller and when they throw an exception, you're aop method would run and you can do your stuff and then the exception would go in your handler class.
To achieve that you should have a class and anotate it with #Aspect and #Component
then have a method anotated with #AfterThrowing and setting the pointcut which will intercept when the given method throws an exception.
Look into Aspect Oriented Programming and Aspectj for more info.
The easy way to handle this case in ControllerAdvice is checking the stacktrace where the exception originated.
#ExceptionHandler(Exception.class)
public String handleExc(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res, Exception e) {
if ( /*Have all null and safe check */ e.getStackTrace()[0].contains("MyController")) {
// Do your exception handling
}
}

Should I provide layer-specific exceptions in a SpringBoot backed REST Api?

I have a SpringBoot based REST Api structured as follows :
Rest Controller -> Service -> Repository
and I'm wondering how exactly to handle exceptions "properly".
For instance, let's say someone calls a /myresources/{id} endpoint with a non-existant {id}. The call gets delegated to the service which in turns tries to get the MyResource from the Repository. It fails and returns null. The Service then throws a MyResourceNotFoundException.
Now I want a specific format for my REST errors so I have a #ControllerAdvice ResponseEntityExceptionHandler which handles the custom serialization of these exceptions (#ExceptionHandler(MyResourceNotFoundException.class)).
Fine.
But this is going to result in a lot of handling/translation for each different custom exception. So I thought I could generify this by adding HttpStatus codes and messages to a base abstract exception class which MyResourceNotFound and others would extend and override. Thus the ResponseEntityExceptionHandler would simply handle building my custom error DTO in a standard way.
But then I realised that I'm adding REST concepts to an exception thrown at the service level. These shouldn't be aware of such notions...
Maybe I should catch the MyResourceNotFoundException in the Controller and throw another layer-specific exception which contains the appropriate messages and HttpStatus etc. in order to handle this generically in the ResponseEntityExceptionHandler...
What are your thoughts on this ?
You can generalize the exception as XYZMicroserviceException.
class XYZGenericException extends Exception{
String message;
custom error details....
XYZgenericException(errorMessage, custom error Details..){
this.message=errorMessage;
.......
}
}
and you can surround the suspected call which would lead to exception with try block and raise the generic exception in catch block that can be handled in global exception handler.
try{
xyz.abcMethod() // may give some exception
}
catch(Exception e){
throw new XYZGenericException(.........)
}
In the exception handler class with #restcontrolleradvice you can annotate the methods with the type of specific exception class to be handled.

Throw Exception through multiple services

I have a little microservice architecture with 3 depending services. Each service represents a seperate Spring Boot project. If an exception occurs on the lowest level of the architecture I would like to throw it through all other services up to the highest/user endpoint service.
Each service API returns a HttpEntity(Response Entity) including a specific object. I found a lot of possible solutions like ResponseEntityExceptionHandlers but all examples shown for a single service architecture without multiple depending services.
Are there any best practices how to throw an Exception through multiple services with Spring Boot?
Assuming that you have three services A (relates directly on B), b (relates directly on C) and C and user calls your service A, but it can be applied to any number of services.
I will briefly describe you the approach
If error occurs in the service C (exception thrown), your code should catch Exception and return a meaningful response. Simplest I can think of would be a #ControllerAdvice
#ControllerAdvice
public class GlobalExceptionHandler {
#ExceptionHandler(YourException.class)
public ResponseEntity<ApiErrorDto> handleYourException(YourException e) {
return ResponseEntity
.status(HttpStatus.BAD_REQUEST) //or any other suitable
.body(new ApiError(e.getMessage());
}
}
ApiError could be just a basic POJO class with a single field holding the message, or any other field meaningful for your exception handling.
Now when your service B receives response it should check whether it is expected status code or an error status code and act accordingly.
Your ApiError class should be shared between all services so that it can be easily serialized/deserialized everywhere. That way once you receive error you can decide what to do next, one of the scenarios could be throwing another exception to be caught by ExceptionHandler in service B.
It's a starter, you can decide whether you want to return a string message in your ApiError, or maybe some kind of a meaningful code etc. Bottom line is that you should include that information in the response of the service where error occurs and interpret that information in the calling service.

Purpose of throwing exception by Spring controller function

I have come across few Spring contoller's function, which are throwing IOException.
#RequestMapping(method = ***)
#ResponseBody
public List<Offering> getOfferingDetailsList(HttpServletResponse response, #PathVariable("productIds") String productIdString, HttpServletRequest request) throws IOException
I doubt about use of such exception throwing, when no one above is catching and handling it. Is it fine to set response status like "response.setStatus(HttpStatus.SC_NOT_FOUND)" in place of throwing such exception ? What is the standard way of handling exception in controller ?
it is always good to have common exception handling functionality , so that we can make our controller code free from exception handling , by externalize to common exception handling functionality, i have come across this interesting topic for this purpose
http://spring.io/blog/2013/11/01/exception-handling-in-spring-mvc
and also use a global exception handler that will do that for all the exceptions of all the controller methods. That will centralize the exception handling, prevent massive code duplication, and avoid cluttering your controller methods.
Look at the #ControllerAdvice and #ExceptionHandler annotations.
A fairly standard way of handling exceptions in Spring Controllers is to use #ExceptionHandler.
Check out this post for more details

Check preconditions in Controller or Service layer

I'm using Google's Preconditions class to validate user's input data.
But I'm worried about where is the best point of checking user's input data using Preconditions class.
First, I wrote validation check code in Controller like below:
#Controller
...
public void register(ProductInfo data) {
Preconditions.checkArgument(StringUtils.hasText(data.getName()),
"Empty name parameter.");
productService.register(data);
}
#Service
...
public void register(ProductInfo data) {
productDao.register(data);
}
But I thought that register method in Service layer would be using another Controller method like below:
#Controller
...
public void register(ProductInfo data) {
productService.register(data);
}
public void anotherRegister(ProductInfo data) {
productService.register(data);
}
#Service
...
public void register(ProductInfo data) {
Preconditions.checkArgument(StringUtils.hasText(data.getName()),
"Empty name parameter.");
productDao.register(data);
}
On the other hand, the method of service layer would be used in just one controller.
I was confused. Which is the better way of checking preconditions in controller or service?
Thanks in advance.
Ideally you would do it in both places. But you are confusing two different things:
Validation (with error handling)
Defensivie Programming (aka assertions, aka design by contract).
You absolutely should do validation in the controller and defensive programming in your service. And here is why.
You need to validate for forms and REST requests so that you can send a sensible error back to the client. This includes what fields are bad and then doing localization of the error messages, etc... (your current example would send me a horrible 500 error message with a stack trace if ProductInfo.name property was null).
Spring has a solution for validating objects in the controller.
Defensive programming is done in the service layer BUT NOT validation because you don't have access to locale to generate proper error messages. Some people do but Spring doesn't really help you there.
The other reason why validation is not done in the service layer is that the ORM already typically does this through the JSR Bean Validation spec (hibernate) but it doesn't generate sensible error messages.
One strategy people do is to create their own preconditions utils library that throws custom derived RuntimeExceptions instead of guava's (and commons lang) IllegalArgumentException and IllegalStateException and then try...catch the exceptions in the controller converting them to validation error messages.
There is no "better" way. If you think that the service is going to be used by multiple controllers (or other pieces of code), then it may well make sense to do the checks there. If it's important to your application to check invalid requests while they're still in the controller, it may well make sense to do the checks there. These two, as you have noticed, are not mutually exclusive. You might have to check twice to cover both scenarios.
Another possible solution: use Bean Validation (JSR-303) to put the checks (preconditions) onto the ProductInfo bean itself. That way you only specify the checks once, and anything that needs to can quickly validate the bean.
Preconditions, validations, whether simple or business should be handled at the filter layer or by interceptors, even before reaching the controller or service layer.
The danger if you check it in your controller layer, you are violating the single responsibility principle of a controller, whose sole purpose is to delegate request and response.
Putting preconditions in service layer is introducing cross cutting concerns to the core business.
Filter or inceptor is built for this purpose. Putting preconditions at the filter layer or in interceptors also allow you to “pick and match” rules you can place in the stack for each servlet request, thus not confining a particular rule to only one servlet request or introduce duplication.
I think in your special case you need to to check it on Service layer and return exception to Controller in case of data integrity error.
#controller
public class MyController{
#ExceptionHandler(MyDataIntegrityExcpetion.class)
public String handleException(MyDataIntegrityExcpetion ex, HttpServletRequest request) {
//do someting on exception or return some view.
}
}
It also depend on what you are doing in controller. whether you return View or just using #ResponseBody Annotation. Spring MVC has nice "out of the box" solution for input/dat validation I recommend you to check this libraries out.
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.x/spring-framework-reference/html/validation.html

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