How to handle errors in Sling Servlet requests | AEM Community Blog Seeding

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How to handle errors in Sling Servlet requests by Jörg Hoh

Abstract

Error handling is a topic which developers rarely pay too much attention to. It is done when the API forces them to handle an exception. And the most common pattern I see is the “log and throw” pattern, which means that the exception is logged and then re-thrown.

When you develop in the context of HTTP requests, error handling can get tricky. Because you need to signal the consumer of the response, that an error happened and the request was not successful. Frameworks are designed in a way that they handle any exception internally and set the correct error code if necessary. And Sling is not different from that, if your code throws an exception (for example the postConstruct of a Sling Model), the Sling framework catches it and sets the correct status code 500 (Internal Server Error).

I’ve seen code, which catches exception itself and sets the status code for the response itself. But this is not the right approach, because every exception handled this way the developers implicitly states: “These are my exceptions and I know best how to handle them”; almost as if the developer takes ownership of these exceptions and their root causes, and that there’s nothing which can handle this situation better.

This approach to handle exceptions on its own is not best practice, and I see 2 problems with it:

Setting the status code alone is not enough, but the remaining parts of the request processing need to stopped as well. Otherwise the processing continues as nothing happened, which is normally not useful or even allowed. It’s hard to ensure this when the exception is caught.
Owning the exception handling removes the responsibility from others. In AEM as a Cloud Service Adobe monitors response codes and the exceptions causing it. And if there’s only a status code 500 but no exception reaching the SlingMainServlet, then it’s likely that this is ignored, because the developer claimed ownership of the exception (handling).

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How to handle errors in Sling Servlet requests

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