Practice: Designing an Error Response Body

Beyond the status code, what a client and a support engineer need in order to act.

An error response body is what a client reads to find out what went wrong and what to do about it. Suppose RideNotFoundException is handled in one @RestControllerAdvice class, a single place whose handlers apply to every controller. Decide which fields its response body should contain so that a client can act on it, and a support engineer can find the failure in the server's logs, before you open a suggestion.

See a reasonable shape

json

{
  "timestamp": "2026-09-15T10:30:45",
  "status": 404,
  "error": "Ride Not Found",
  "message": "Ride not found with id: 100",
  "path": "/rides/100"
}

Enough to log, enough to display, and enough to match against a server-side log by time and path. The status is repeated in the body so that a client which only parses the body still knows what happened.

Spring 6 also supports ProblemDetail, a standard error format (RFC 9457) with fields such as status, title and detail. Returning it from every handler gives the API a shape that client libraries already understand.

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