Handling Exceptions

By default, if an annotated listener method throws an exception, it is thrown to the container and the message are requeued and redelivered, discarded, or routed to a dead letter exchange, depending on the container and broker configuration. Nothing is returned to the sender.

Starting with version 2.0, the @RabbitListener annotation has two new attributes: errorHandler and returnExceptions.

These are not configured by default.

You can use the errorHandler to provide the bean name of a RabbitListenerErrorHandler implementation. This functional interface has one method, as follows:

@FunctionalInterface
public interface RabbitListenerErrorHandler {

    Object handleError(Message amqpMessage, org.springframework.messaging.Message<?> message,
              ListenerExecutionFailedException exception) throws Exception;

}

As you can see, you have access to the raw message received from the container, the spring-messaging Message<?> object produced by the message converter, and the exception that was thrown by the listener (wrapped in a ListenerExecutionFailedException). The error handler can either return some result (which is sent as the reply) or throw the original or a new exception (which is thrown to the container or returned to the sender, depending on the returnExceptions setting).

The returnExceptions attribute, when true, causes exceptions to be returned to the sender. The exception is wrapped in a RemoteInvocationResult object. On the sender side, there is an available RemoteInvocationAwareMessageConverterAdapter, which, if configured into the RabbitTemplate, re-throws the server-side exception, wrapped in an AmqpRemoteException. The stack trace of the server exception is synthesized by merging the server and client stack traces.

This mechanism generally works only with the default SimpleMessageConverter, which uses Java serialization. Exceptions are generally not “Jackson-friendly” and cannot be serialized to JSON. If you use JSON, consider using an errorHandler to return some other Jackson-friendly Error object when an exception is thrown.

In version 2.1, this interface moved from package o.s.amqp.rabbit.listener to o.s.amqp.rabbit.listener.api.

Starting with version 2.1.7, the Channel is available in a messaging message header; this allows you to ack or nack the failed messasge when using AcknowledgeMode.MANUAL:

public Object handleError(Message amqpMessage, org.springframework.messaging.Message<?> message,
          ListenerExecutionFailedException exception) {
              ...
              message.getHeaders().get(AmqpHeaders.CHANNEL, Channel.class)
                  .basicReject(message.getHeaders().get(AmqpHeaders.DELIVERY_TAG, Long.class),
                               true);
          }

Starting with version 2.2.18, if a message conversion exception is thrown, the error handler will be called, with null in the message argument. This allows the application to send some result to the caller, indicating that a badly-formed message was received. Previously, such errors were thrown and handled by the container.