10.12.3 Vnd.Error Support

Vnd.Error is a standardised way of expressing an error response.

By default when a validation error occurs when attempting to POST new resources then the errors object will be sent back allow with a 422 respond code:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/json"  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d "" http://localhost:8080/books
HTTP/1.1 422 Unprocessable Entity
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: application/json;charset=ISO-8859-1
{
  "errors": [
    {
      "object": "rest.test.Book",
      "field": "title",
      "rejected-value": null,
      "message": "Property [title] of class [class rest.test.Book] cannot be null"
    }
  ]
}

If you wish to change the format to Vnd.Error then simply register grails.rest.render.errors.VndErrorJsonRenderer bean in grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy:

beans = {
    vndJsonErrorRenderer(grails.rest.render.errors.VndErrorJsonRenderer)
    // for Vnd.Error XML format
    vndXmlErrorRenderer(grails.rest.render.errors.VndErrorXmlRenderer)
}

Then if you alter the client request to accept Vnd.Error you get an appropriate response:

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/vnd.error+json,application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d "" http://localhost:8080/books
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: application/vnd.error+json;charset=ISO-8859-1
[
    {
        "logref": "book.nullable,
        "message": "Property [title] of class [class rest.test.Book] cannot be null",
        "_links": {
            "resource": {
                "href": "http://localhost:8080/rest-test/books"
            }
        }
    }
]