WebApplicationException

In Java REST you can throw a WebApplicationException, which indicates that something went wrong. You can add the HTTP Status to the exception, to indicate what went wrong.

throw new WebApplicationException(Response.Status.BAD_REQUEST);

But that amount of information is in most cases too little. Sure, a HTTP Status of 404 (Not Found) is quite clear, but you'd like some more information.

Luckily, I found out that we can add an entity in the Response and add the Response to the WebApplicationException.

In fact, it is the most convenient to just create your own subclass of WebApplicationException to handle this automatically.

Your own WebApplicationException

An Error Entity

The entity that gets translated into JSON and passed over the line, in my case called ErrorDetails, can provide all the information you need.

The getResponse method is the one that creates the Response, which is used to provide the HTTP Status code and the error payload for the WebApplicationException.

The json generated looks like:

{
    timestamp="2014-09-21T21:34:01.831",
    errormessage="sdsgsdgsgd was not found.",
    stacktrace=””,
    user="sdsgsdgsgd"
}

JQuery

It just took a little effort to retrieve the ErrorDetail object from the Xqhr object in the JQuery Ajax call. This should be done during error processing, as shown in the JQuery Ajax call below.

The webError in the code above is a function to parse the JSON containing ErrorDetails object, provided below.

It parses the jqXHR.responseText, to be precise. And if a stacktrace is provided, the details are put into a HTML tag with id "warning". An 'alert' is always provided.