Exceptions

When something is wrong in a Java program, an exception is thrown. This chapter explains how HttpMaid will react when this occurs and how you can map exceptions to responses.

Let’s start by throwing an exception in a handler and see what happens:

final HttpMaid httpMaid = anHttpMaid()
        .get("/exception", (request, response) -> {
            throw new RuntimeException("this is an example");
        })
        .build();

When running the example and navigating to http://localhost:1337/exception, you should just see an empty page (with the status code 500, but your browser will probably not show you this). In the console output of the application, you will see the complete stacktrace of the thrown exception:

ERROR: java.lang.RuntimeException: this is an example
	at de.quantummaid.httpmaid.documentation.exceptions.ExceptionExampleTests.lambda$main$0(ExceptionInHandlerExample.java:36)
	at de.quantummaid.httpmaid.handler.http.HttpHandler.handle(HttpHandler.java:33)
	at de.quantummaid.httpmaid.handler.InvokeHandlerProcessor.apply(InvokeHandlerProcessor.java:46)
	[...]

HttpMaid’s default behaviour for exception handling is to log the exception and return a generic status code 500 response with an empty body. If you want to change this, you can use the toMapExceptionsByDefaultUsing() configurator method in the ExceptionConfigurators class. It is called with a lambda that receives the thrown exception and a HttpResponse object:

final HttpMaid httpMaid = anHttpMaid()
        .get("/exception", (request, response) -> {
            throw new RuntimeException("this is an example");
        })
        .configured(toMapExceptionsByDefaultUsing((exception, request, response) -> response.setBody("Something went wrong")))
        .build();

If you now navigate to http://localhost:1337/exception, you should see the message Something went wrong.

In addition to specifying the default behaviour, you can define custom responses for specific types (and subtypes) of exceptions. To do this, you would use the toMapExceptionsOfType() configurator method (again in ExceptionConfigurators). So let’s change the type of the exception to something more specific and handle that type explicitly:

final HttpMaid httpMaid = anHttpMaid()
        .get("/exception", (request, response) -> {
            throw new UnsupportedOperationException("this is an example");
        })
        .configured(toMapExceptionsByDefaultUsing((exception, request, response) -> response.setBody("Something went wrong")))
        .configured(toMapExceptionsOfType(UnsupportedOperationException.class, (exception, request, response) -> response.setBody("Operation not supported")))
        .build();

When starting the application and navigating to http://localhost:1337/exception, you should now see the Operation not supported message instead of Something went wrong.

Page not found

Whenever HttpMaid receives a request to a route that does not exist in its configuration, it will answer the request with the status code 404 (“Not Found”). You can alter this behaviour like this:

final HttpMaid httpMaid = anHttpMaid()
        .post("/hello", (request, response) -> response.setBody("Hello!"))
        .configured(Configurators.toHandlePageNotFoundUsing((request, response) -> response.setStatus(403)))
        .build();