DefaultErrorHandler

This is the default Error Handler in Camel.

The default Error Handler has the same power as the Dead Letter Channel. However, it does not support a dead letter queue, which is the only difference between the two of them.

The DefaultErrorHandler is configured differently from Dead Letter Channel as it is configured to:

  • not redeliver

  • not handled

  • no dead letter queue (because it is not possible)

By default, any exception thrown during routing will be propagated back to the caller and the Exchange ends immediately. However, you can use the Exception Clause to catch a given exception and lower the exception by marking it as handled. If so, the exception will not be sent back to the caller, and the Exchange will succeed, but not continue being routed. See the difference between handled and continued in the Exception Clause documentation.

Example

In this route below, any exception thrown in, such as the validateOrder bean, will be propagated back to the caller via the jetty endpoint, which then returns an HTTP error message back to the client.

from("jetty:http://localhost/myservice/order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("jms:queue:order");

We can add an onException in case we want to catch certain exceptions and route them differently, for instance to catch a ValidationException and return a fixed response to the caller.

onException(ValidationException.class)
  .handled(true)
  .transform(body(constant("INVALID ORDER")));

from("jetty:http://localhost/myservice/order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("jms:queue:order");

When the ValidationException is thrown from the validateOrder bean, it is intercepted by Camel error handler which lets the onException(ValidationException.class) handle the exception. The Exchange is routed to this onException route, and since we use handled(true), then the original exception is cleared, and we transform the message into a fixed response that is returned to jetty endpoint that returns it to the original caller.

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