Question

I am working on a REST api using Spring-MVC and json. I running my automatic tests using Jetty and an in-memory database. I want to test that posting an invalid domain object gives me the error message from the @NotEmpty annotation. But all I get is the default Jetty 400 Bad Request page.

I have a domain class with some validation:

@Entity
public class Company {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;

    @NotEmpty(message = "Name is a required field")
    private String name;

    /* getters, setters */
}

Here’s the controller

@Controller
public class CompanyController {
    @RequestMapping(value = "/company", 
        method = RequestMethod.POST, 
        consumes = "application/json")
    public void createCompany(
        @Valid @RequestBody final Company company,
        final HttpServletResponse response) {

        //persist company
        response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_CREATED);
        response.setHeader("location", "/company/" + company.getId());
    }
}

How can I get the value "Name is a required field" returned as part of the response?

Answer 1

This does it:

@ExceptionHandler(value = MethodArgumentNotValidException.class)
public void exceptionHandler(final MethodArgumentNotValidException ex, 
                     final HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException {

    for (final ObjectError objectError : ex.getBindingResult().getAllErrors()) {
        response.getWriter().append(objectError.getDefaultMessage()).append(".");
    }
    response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_BAD_REQUEST);
}