Spring MVC: using @ResponseStatus(reason = '') on a @ResponseBody exception handler in tomcat

Question

Does anybody know why I cannot use @ResponseStatus(reason = \"My message\") on an exception handler in spring MVC while still returning a @ResponseBody. What se

Answer 1

It seems that this is a direct result of the following code from AnnotationMethodHandlerExceptionResolver

private ModelAndView getModelAndView(Method handlerMethod, Object returnValue, ServletWebRequest webRequest)
        throws Exception {

    ResponseStatus responseStatusAnn = AnnotationUtils.findAnnotation(handlerMethod, ResponseStatus.class);
    if (responseStatusAnn != null) {
        HttpStatus responseStatus = responseStatusAnn.value();
        String reason = responseStatusAnn.reason();
        if (!StringUtils.hasText(reason)) {
            // this doesn't commit the response
            webRequest.getResponse().setStatus(responseStatus.value());
        }
        else {
            // this commits the response such that any more calls to write to the 
            // response are ignored
            webRequest.getResponse().sendError(responseStatus.value(), reason);
        }
    }
    /// snip
}

This has been reported to Springsource in SPR-8251:

Answer 2

For the record, since Spring 3.2, this got even worse because the AnnotationMethodHandlerExceptionResolver has been replaced by the ResponseStatusExceptionResolver and it does:

protected ModelAndView resolveResponseStatus(ResponseStatus responseStatus, HttpServletRequest request,
  HttpServletResponse response, Object handler, Exception ex) throws Exception {

  int statusCode = responseStatus.value().value();
  String reason = responseStatus.reason();
  if (this.messageSource != null) {
    reason = this.messageSource.getMessage(reason, null, reason, LocaleContextHolder.getLocale());
  }
  if (!StringUtils.hasLength(reason)) {
    response.sendError(statusCode);
  }
  else {
    response.sendError(statusCode, reason);
  }
  return new ModelAndView();
}

This is worth a bug report. Moreover, the @ResponseStatus is documented with setStatus and is ill-designed. It should have been called @ResponseError.

I have created two issues for this finally: SPR-11192 and SPR-11193.

Almost a year has passed and my two issues are still open. I do not consider Spring WebMVC as a first-class REST framework which it isn't imho, WebMVC is for humas and not machines :-(