对REST客户端的Spring-MVC验证响应

Question

I'm using Spring 3 MVC (No views and Models, only machine interaction), REST API.
My Controller performs validation on the input object and may produce several validation errors (eg: "invalid email", "phone umber is missing").
My question is, what is the best way to return several error descriptions in my HTTP response object? Assuming that I cant return an "Error Map" as a return type (method already returning a response object or it is void)

Answer 1

I would recommend populating an object with your error messages mapped to their respective errors. (For example, {"email" : "A Valid Email Address Must be Provided"}).

And in the Controller method where you are performing the validation, if you tag the method with @ResponseBody annotation (and make sure that your Spring MVC application is mvc:annotation-driven), then you can just return that object after completing a validation check.

By tagging your method with @ResponseBody, Spring 3 will automatically serialize the object to JSON. Then at your front-end, you can use a simple jQuery call to parse the errors and post error messages accordingly.

Here is a good example of how all of this works on Spring 3 blog .

Answer 2

This may be a bit outdated, but it is better to use Http response codes as much as possible if you are developing strictly REST services. I would return a 422 with an array of error messages in the body if there are problems with the input. If not, I would send back a 200 without anything in the body.

Also for creating a new record, new mapping etc, I would send back a 201 with the URI reference of the new entity in the Location header.