How to return HTTP Codes in web services

Question

I've a SOAP web service built in Java.

If my method runs into an exception I want to return a "HTTP CODE 500".

Is it possible? If yes how?

(Web service is running on Tomcat 6)

Answer 1

maybe you should simply throw a qualified Exception yourself which then will be sent back to the client as a soap fault. W3C tells us this:

In case of a SOAP error while processing the request, the SOAP HTTP server MUST issue an HTTP 500 "Internal Server Error" response and include a SOAP message in the response containing a SOAP Fault element (see section 4.4) indicating the SOAP processing error. http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/

Messing with http response codes could be dangerous as some other client might expect a different response. In your case you'd be lucky because you want exactly the the behaviour as specified by W3C. So throw an Exception ;)

How to do that? Take a look here: How to throw a custom fault on a JAX-WS web service?

Greetings

Bastian

Answer 2

Since the JAX-WS is based on servlets, you can do it. You can try the next:

@WebService
public class Calculator {

    @Resource
    private WebServiceContext ctx;

    public int division (int a, int b) {
        try {
            return a / b;
        } catch (ArithmeticException e) {
            sendError(500, "Service unavailable for you.");
            return -1; // never send
        }
    }

    private void sendError(int status, String msg) {
        try {
            MessageContext msgCtx = ctx.getMessageContext();
            HttpServletResponse response = 
               (HttpServletResponse) msgCtx.get(MessageContext.SERVLET_RESPONSE);
            response.sendError(status, msg);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // Never happens or yes?
        }
    }

}

However, I prefer to use JAX-RS to do something similar.

@PUT
@Path("test")
@Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED)
public Response update( //
        @FormParam("id") int id,
        @FormParam("fname") String fname,
        @FormParam("lname") String lname
        ) {
    try {

        // do something

        return Response.ok("Successfully updated", 
                MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN_TYPE).build();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        LOG.error("An error occurred", e);
        return Response.status(Response.Status.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR)
                .entity("An error occurred")
                .type(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN_TYPE).build();
    }
}