Question

I have two types of controllers in my spring application.

• View controllers that forward to views to generate HTML
• API controllers that return JSON directly from the controllers

Both the API and View controllers are part of the same spring dispatcher servlet. Spring 3.2 introduced the @ControllerAdvice annotation to allow for a global location to handle exception.

The documentation implies that @ControllerAdvice will be applied to every controller associated with a Dispatcher Servlet.

Is there a way to configure which controllers @ControllerAdvice will apply to?

For example in my scenario I want a @ControllerAdvice for my View Controllers and separate @ControllerAdvice for my API controllers.

Answer 1

I do not think this is possible now. If you can make the API and View controllers throw different Exception types, then you could define two different @ExceptionHandlers and achieve what you want.

// For handling API Exceptions
@ExceptionHandler(APIException.class)  // Single API Exception 
@ExceptionHandler({APIException.class, ..., ,,,}) // Multiple API Exceptions

// For handling View Exceptions
@ExceptionHandler(ViewException.class) // Single View Exception
@ExceptionHandler({ViewException.class, ..., ...}) // Multiple View Exceptions

You could use aop to translate the Exceptions coming out of APIs to a standard APIException. See this thread on spring forums.

Hope it helps.