Web Application Exception Management

• Catch exceptions where you can do something about them (or let them propagate all the way up to the top level handler).

• Categorization

• Catch ALL exceptions at the top level of the application

  • nice message to the user
  • log as much info as possible to the appropriate log. See Web Application Logging

What kind of exceptions should you make yourself?

Here are some examples..

• ExternalServiceException (abstract)
• One subclass of the above for each external service or system you integrate with.

• According to log levels

• Wrap ugly exceptions (Spring and Hibernate, for instance, do this nicely for SQLException).

Resources

Error Handling And Exception Management

A funny exception

While attempting to save this page and moving it between spaces at the same time, we got this javascript-error from Confluence after saving:

Is this a nice message to the user? ;)

We can see here that Confluence does have a top-level exception handler for AJAX actions. This is important to remember, because your normal exception filter/interceptor probably doesn't handle this.