Going by the code above, you need to be more careful about which exceptions you are throwing and handling. Setting up an exception handler for Throwable seems overly broad.
The way I do this is to create an ErrorMessage class with my XML/JSON marshalling annotations.
@XmlRootElement(name = "error")
public class ErrorMessage {
private Throwable exception;
private String message;
public ErrorMessage() {
this.message = "";
}
public ErrorMessage(String message) {
this.message = message;
}
public ErrorMessage(Throwable exception) {
this.exception = exception;
this.message = exception.getLocalizedMessage();
}
@XmlTransient
@JsonIgnore
public Throwable getException() {
return exception;
}
public void setException(Throwable exception) {
this.exception = exception;
}
@XmlElement(name = "message")
public String getMessage() {
return message;
}
public void setMessage(String message) {
this.message = message;
}
}
With that in place, I tend to create my own application exceptions and then create my exception handler methods such as:
@ExceptionHandler(ResourceNotFoundException.class)
@ResponseBody
@ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND)
public ErrorMessage handleResourceNotFoundException(ResourceNotFoundException e, HttpServletRequest req) {
return new ErrorMessage(e);
}
@ExceptionHandler(InternalServerErrorException.class)
@ResponseBody
@ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR)
public ErrorMessage handleInternalServerErrorException(InternalServerErrorException e, HttpServletRequest req) {
return new ErrorMessage(e);
}
With those in place, I just need to throw appropriate exceptions from my controller methods. For instance, if I throw a ResourceNotFoundException, then Spring will redirect that to my handleResourceNotFoundException method, which returns a 404, and that will also return JSON or XML representing the error.