Mastering Exception Handling in Spring Boot: A Comprehensive Guide

Exception handling is a critical aspect of developing robust and reliable software applications. Spring Boot, a popular Java-based framework, offers a diverse set of tools and techniques for managing exceptions effectively. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore various ways of exception handling in Spring Boot, accompanied by plenty of examples.

Global Exception Handling with @ControllerAdvice
One of the fundamental ways to handle exceptions globally in a Spring Boot application is by using the @ControllerAdvice annotation. This annotation allows you to define global exception handlers that will be applied across all controllers.

@ControllerAdvice
public class GlobalExceptionHandler {

    @ExceptionHandler(Exception.class)
    public ResponseEntity<String> handleException(Exception e) {
        return new ResponseEntity<>("An unexpected error occurred: " + e.getMessage(), HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
    }
}

In this example, the @ExceptionHandler annotation is used to define a method that handles exceptions of type Exception. It returns a custom error message and an HTTP status code.

Controller-Specific Exception Handling
You can also handle exceptions at the controller level using the @ExceptionHandler annotation directly in the controller class.

@RestController
public class MyController {…