Getting JSON from RetrofitError object using Retrofit

Question

I am using the Retrofit library to do REST calls to a service I am using.

If I make an API call to my service and have a failure, the service returns a bit of JSON

Answer 1

A much neater way to do this is to create a class that can do the parsing/conversion for you, one that you can call anytime, anywhere.

public class ApiError {
    public String error = "An error occurred";

    public ApiError(Throwable error) {
        if (error instanceof HttpException) {
            String errorJsonString = null;
            try {
                errorJsonString = ((HttpException) 
                error).response().errorBody().string();
            } catch (IOException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            JsonElement parsedString = new 
            JsonParser().parse(errorJsonString);
            this.error = parsedString.getAsJsonObject()
                                     .get("error")
                                     .getAsString();
        } else {
            this.error = error.getMessage() != null ? error.getMessage() : this.error;
        }
    }
}

You can now use this anywhere, like so

ApiError error = new ApiError(error)
error.error

This is all from this blog post (which I wrote).