REST service: The proper way of returning exception

Question

I use Jersey API for my REST service. My question is: Is there a more elegant way of returning exceptions in a JSON form? Is it better to concern myself with creating a json obj

Answer 1

You can wrap your error into a class, say I have an ErrorData class which has status, message and stacktrace. Everytime an exception occurs, I throw a GeneralAppException with the errordata object.

public class GeneralAppException  extends WebApplicationException {
 public GeneralAppException(ErrorData er) {

            super(Response.status(er.getStatusCode()).
            entity(er).type(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON).build());
          }
}

I have another class which has all the known errors, eg.

public static final ErrorData NODATAFOUND = new ErrorData(Response.Status.NOT_FOUND.getStatusCode(),"No data was found for given query");

public static final ErrorData CODEERROR = new ErrorData(502,"CodeError");

Your catch can look like

catch (ExceptionREST e) {
        throw new GeneralAppException(ErrorData.NODATAFOUND);
    } 

Reference used : https://jersey.java.net/documentation/latest/representations.html#d0e6665