HOWTO handle 404 exceptions globally using Spring MVC configured using Java based Annotations

Question

I am building a Spring 4 MVC app. And it is completely configured using Java Annotations. There is no web.xml. The app is configured by using instance of

Answer 1

Instead overriding registerDispatcherServlet one can override the createDispatcherServlet method as follows.

@Override
    protected DispatcherServlet createDispatcherServlet(WebApplicationContext servletAppContext) {
        DispatcherServlet ds = new DispatcherServlet(servletAppContext);
        ds.setThrowExceptionIfNoHandlerFound(true);
        return ds;
    }

Answer 2

Enable DispatcherServlet throw a NoHandlerFoundException through web.xml configuartion.

<init-param>
    <param-name>throwExceptionIfNoHandlerFound</param-name>
    <param-value>true</param-value>
</init-param>

Answer 3

I resolved the problem with the following entry in my application.yml

 server.error.whitelabel.enabled: false
 spring.mvc.throw-exception-if-no-handler-found: true

and the following ControllerExceptionHandler:

@ControllerAdvice
public class ControllerExceptionHandler {

@ExceptionHandler(Exception.class)
@ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.BAD_REQUEST)
public String processMethodNotSupportedException(Exception exception) {
    exception.printStackTrace();
    return "error";
}

}

and last but not least i added a template "/html/error.html"

Answer 4

By default, the DispatcherServlet does not throw a NoHandlerFoundException. You need to enable that.

The AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer should let you override how the DispatcherServlet is created. Do that and call

DispatcherServlet dispatcherServlet = ...; // might get it from super implementation
dispatcherServlet.setThrowExceptionIfNoHandlerFound(true);

Answer 5

I can't comment on the above post by @Ysak (reputation<50), however I can confirm that this method does work with the setup described by the OP.

I will add that from another guide I also had the DefaultServletHandling configured in my WebConfig to fix a separate issue, as below:

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
@ComponentScan("com.acme.tat.controllers")
public class WebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter implements ApplicationContextAware {
...
@Override
public void configureDefaultServletHandling(DefaultServletHandlerConfigurer configurer) {
        configurer.enable();
}

}

With this set to enable, there is no Exception thrown. Once I removed this line and set up manual resourceHandlers everything worked as expected.

It took me around 2.5 hours to set up 404 redirecting because of this simple one line method.