jQuery Ajax error handling, show custom exception messages

Question

Is there some way I can show custom exception messages as an alert in my jQuery AJAX error message?

For example, if I want to throw an exception on the server side v

Answer 1

I believe the Ajax response handler uses the HTTP status code to check if there was an error.

So if you just throw a Java exception on your server side code but then the HTTP response doesn't have a 500 status code jQuery (or in this case probably the XMLHttpRequest object) will just assume that everything was fine.

I'm saying this because I had a similar problem in ASP.NET where I was throwing something like a ArgumentException("Don't know what to do...") but the error handler wasn't firing.

I then set the Response.StatusCode to either 500 or 200 whether I had an error or not.