Spring Webapp throwing 404 errors with no console log

Question

I am working on a web application using the Spring framework and Hibernate. My problem is that I often receive 404 errors caused by a mistake I have made somewhere in the codebase but there are no exception messages in the console. Because of this I am struggling to find where the mistake is because the project has become very large and manually trying to find the problem is impractical. I'm assuming that Spring is causing the problem so my question is: is there some way of enabling more detailed error messages? Thanks

Answer 1

404 is an http error and only your web server might be knowing of it. Very likely with these failed requests, your application server or Spring container was never hit. Look for web server logs to identify the problem.

Troubleshooting 404 on IIS server

http://blogs.iis.net/tomkmvp/archive/2009/04/27/troubleshooting-a-404.aspx

Troubleshooting 404 on RAD web server

http://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27035752&aid=1

Answer 2

As a couple of people have already alluded to it, the issue here is that certain errors (like the 404 exception) get intercepted by the Servlet container, therefore never reaching Spring and whatever logging mechanisms you have may have set up. So the trick here is to change the order of importance of your Exceptions so that Spring gets a crack at it.

The best approach I have ever come across to catch, handle and adequately log all exceptions in Spring is described in this article: http://steveliles.github.io/configuring_global_exception_handling_in_spring_mvc.html

I have been implementing this setup since I came across that blog post, and it has been a lifesaver to say the least. It will give you the detailed error messages you need. The key is to basically create a custom Exception Handler by implementing Spring's HandlerExceptionResolver and Ordered interfaces, then returning the lowest possible order number, thus moving your exception handling up the totem pole:

import org.springframework.core.*;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.*

public class LoggingHandlerExceptionResolver 
implements HandlerExceptionResolver, Ordered {
    public int getOrder() {
        return Integer.MIN_VALUE; // we're first in line, yay!
    }

    public ModelAndView resolveException(
        HttpServletRequest aReq, HttpServletResponse aRes,
        Object aHandler, Exception anExc
    ) {
        anExc.printStackTrace(); // again, you can do better than this ;)
        return null; // trigger other HandlerExceptionResolver's
    }
}

Answer 3

The problem ended up being that there were a couple of missing annotations from one of my Hibernate entities. Following the procedure from the link below helped track it down by providing more detailed error messages:

http://www.captaindebug.com/2011/07/using-hibernate-validation-annotation.html

Answer 4

I also hit the problem of no console output while 404 error.

As in The Saint's answer, one of the causes of no console log: the issue here is that certain errors (like the 404 exception) get intercepted by the Servlet container

"spring-framework-reference-3.2.3.pdf" --> 1.3 --> Logging --> Using Log4J, solved the problem in my environment.