Throwing custom exceptions in JAX-WS

Question

I have a JAX-WS web service with a web method that may throw an exception.

@WebMethod
public Folder getTree() throws UnauthorizedException {
    //...
    // Get authorization data..
    //...
    if (!authorized) {
        throw new UnauthorizedException();
    }
    //...
}

It works all right if user is authorized, but when the exception is thrown it doesn't generate SOAP message with a fault, it just crashes web service with

SEVERE: Unauthorized
    ru.cos.xdoc.storage.UnauthorizedException: Unauthorized
    at ru.cos.xdoc.storage.Storage.getTree(Storage.java:136)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
    ...

and closes connection

HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
X-Powered-By: Servlet/2.5
Server: Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1.1
Content-Type: text/xml;charset="utf-8"
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:43:59 GMT
Connection: close  

I feel like I miss something simple

EDIT The problem has proven to arise only in the case an exception is thrown not long after the beginning of web method. When a delay is introduced before throwing an exception, like

try {
    Thread.sleep(3000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

throw new UnauthorizedException();

everything works fine.

Does anybody have a clue what may cause such a strange behaviour?

Answer 1

Hi, maybe it would be simpler just to build a message telling "Permission denied", or something like that. In my opinion, a web service should never throw an exception, it should always return a response.

Answer 2

Have you mapped your exception to a Fault? See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2064447/jax-ws-map-exceptions-to-faults