How to implement custom error string with Spring's @ExceptionHandler?

In a web controller I have an @ExceptionHandler implementation to handle a certain type of device exception I can get. It looks like this :

    @ExceptionHandler(DeviceException.class)
    @ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR)
    @ResponseBody
public void handleException(DeviceException ex) {
    log.error("controller caught exception " + ex.getMessage());
            return ex.getMessage();
}    

What I want to achieve is to have this return the Exception's message when a DeviceException is thrown.

On the client side I have this jQuery code, current problem is I can't seem to get any of the ex.getMessage() content in the error callback, that's what I need to solve.

        $.ajax( {
        type: "GET",
        url: "<c:url value="/x/y/status"/>.json",
        dataType: "json",
        cache: false,
        success: function ( data ){
          // use the data
        },
        error: function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {
            // problem : all 3 of the data below (responseText etc.) are b开发者_JAVA技巧lank when I've thrown a DeviceException

            alert('jqXHR.responseText = ', jqXHR.responseText);
            alert('textStatus = ', textStatus);
            alert('errorThrown = ', errorThrown);
        }
    } );

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@ResponseStatus has a value field too. This can be used to set any custom messages. Check the documentation @ http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/javadoc-api/org/springframework/web/bind/annotation/ResponseStatus.html

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The @ExceptionHandler mechanism is very flexible with the parameters and return types the method annotated with it can have.

You can use some combination of the HttpServletResponse object or returning a Model and/or View to return something meaningful to the AJAX caller - for example, a specific response code, or write something to the output stream you can parse in JavaScript, etc.