Oct 21, 2014

Logging REST Exceptions with Spring

To enable logging for REST errors in Spring when using a ResponseEntityExceptionHandler just enable debug on ExceptionHandlerExceptionResolver

Without setting debug to true, your errors will still be handled perfectly but you will not receive any messages in your server logs about the handled error.

Of course, there’s also a complicated way to register an extended ExceptionHandlerExceptionResolver and set the warnLogCategory. But that is too much work when you can just enable debug logging to get a nice message like this:

DEBUG 15 Oct 2014 09:03:58,391 (AbstractHandlerExceptionResolver.java:134) – Resolving exception from handler [null]: org.springframework.web.bind.UnsatisfiedServletRequestParameterException: Parameter conditions “startDay” not met for actual request parameters:

And if you aren’t already using it, you can easily handle any REST exceptions from your Spring Controllers with a @ControllerAdvice annotated class that extends ResponseEntityExceptionHandler. Here is an example RestResponseEntityExceptionHandler that I use:

About the Author

Jeff Sheets profile.

Jeff Sheets

VP - Technology

Jeff has developed Java, Groovy, Grails, and Javascript web apps for industries as varied as Defense, Energy, Weather, Insurance, and Telecom. He is a co-organizer of the Omaha Java Users Group. Jeff has worked on Grails projects since the Grails 1.3.x days, and has experience with production Groovy code as well as Spock tests and Gradle builds. His latest focus has been on AngularJS and Spring Boot applications using JHipster. Jeff also enjoys volunteering at local CoderDojo events to teach programming to our next generation.

One thought on “Logging REST Exceptions with Spring

  1. Wim Deblauwe says:

    What is “ExceptionMessage” ? Is this your own class?

  2. Jeff Sheets says:

    Yes, I forgot to remove ExceptionMessage pieces before posting. It is just a simple wrapper class that we used on that project.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Blog Posts
Android Development for iOS Developers
Android development has greatly improved since the early days. Maybe you tried it out when Android development was done in Eclipse, emulators were slow and buggy, and Java was the required language. Things have changed […]
Add a custom object to your Liquibase diff
Adding a custom object to your liquibase diff is a pretty simple two step process. Create an implementation of DatabaseObject Create an implementation of SnapshotGenerator In my case I wanted to add tracking of Stored […]
Keeping Secrets Out of Terraform State
There are many instances where you will want to create resources via Terraform with secrets that you just don’t want anyone to see. These could be IAM credentials, certificates, RDS DB credentials, etc. One problem […]
Validating Terraform Plans using Open Policy Agent
When developing infrastructure as code using terraform, it can be difficult to test and validate changes without executing the code against a real environment. The feedback loop between writing a line of code and understanding […]