Spring MVC: Designing Real-World Web Applications

Status codes and exception handling

The first thing we want to do is to correctly handle response statuses. By default, Spring automatically deals with some statuses:

• 500 Server Error: This indicates that an exception occurred while handling the request.
• 405 Method not Supported: This comes up when you use an incorrect method on an existing handler.
• 404 Not Found: This comes up when the handler does not exist.
• 400 Bad Request: This indicates that the request body or parameter does not match the server's expectation.
• 200 OK: It is thrown for any request handled without an error.

With Spring MVC, there are two ways to return status codes:

• Returning a ResponseEntity class from a REST controller
• Throwing an exception that will be caught in dedicated handlers ...