Global exception page in Apache Tiles and Spring MVC

Question

When an unhandled exception is throws (e.g. a RuntimeException), then I want to show a common error page.

I want to achieve a few things:

• reuse a HTML template (use a common "frame" with header etc.) and place exception info in the body
• provide some basic info about the exception in the body document

I am using Apache Tiles and Spring MVC. What is a good approach to my problem?

Part of my tiles-definitions:

<tiles-definitions>
    <definition name="common" template="/WEB-INF/jsp/common.jsp">
        <put-attribute name="header" value="header"/>
        <put-attribute name="footer" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/footer.jsp"/>
    </definition>
   ...
   <definition name="main" extends="common">
       <put-attribute name="body" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/main.jsp"/>
   </definition>
</tiles-definitions>

Ideally I'd like to specify a definition for an exception page by setting the body attribute...

Answer 1

Assuming you have Spring's TilesViewResolver and TilesConfigurer configured, you can try the following bean definition:

<bean id="exceptionResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleMappingExceptionResolver">
   <property name="exceptionMappings">
      <props>
         <prop key="java.lang.Throwable">error</prop>
      </props>
   </property>
</bean>

And then simply define the logical view error:

<definition name="error" extends="common">
    <put-attribute name="body" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/error.jsp"/>
</definition>

This will forward any Throwable to the right view, where you have access to the exception itself (${exception}). This doesn't replace all standard HTTP error pages (for 404 etc.)