Smithy Server Generator for TypeScript error handling#

Errors are structures associated with services and operations in the Smithy model and are used to indicate that the server encountered a problem during request processing. Structures with the error trait are code generated as subclasses of Error.

If a code-generated Error is thrown from a handler implementation, and the Error is associated with the operation or service in the model, then the server SDK will serialize the Error according to the rules of the protocol. For instance, HTTP binding protocols set the status code of the response based on the @httpError trait.

If a non-code-generated Error, or a code-generated Error that is not associated with the operation or service in the model, is thrown from a handler, then a synthetic InternalFailure will be rendered as the result instead.

Synthetic errors#

Synthetic errors are errors that are not included in the Smithy model, but can still be thrown by the server SDK. In general, these errors are not expected to have corresponding code generated types on the client side. These errors fall into two categories: framework-level errors that are unavoidable, and errors that are associated with the low-level transport protocol, such as HTTP.

For backwards compatibility purposes, the names of synthetic errors generally end with Exception.

Unavoidable errors#

InternalFailureException#

InternalFailureException is the catch-all exception for unexpected errors. It indicates either a bug in the framework or an exception being thrown from the handler that is not modeled. The server SDK will never include any details about internal failures, such as a meaningful exception message, to the caller, in order to prevent unintended information disclosure.

Service developers wishing to throw an InternalFailureException to indicate a bug in their code can simply throw a built-in JavaScript error such as TypeError.

SerializationException#

SerializationException is thrown by the server SDK when a request is unparseable, or if there is a type mismatch between a member in the serialized request and the member in the Smithy model. Since these failures occur during the deserialization process, server developers have no ability to customize these messages, and they will short-circuit request processing before validation occurs.

UnknownOperationException#

UnknownOperationException is returned when the request cannot be matched to a handler known to the server SDK. This can happen either because the server SDK does not recognize the request protocol, which is common for internet-facing endpoints that receive robotic traffic, or if the request is in a known protocol but for an operation that is unknown to the handler. The latter case can indicate a misconfiguration, such as an operation-level handler being used incorrectly.

Protocol errors#

UnsupportedMediaTypeException#

UnsupportedMediaTypeException represents HTTP error 415, returned when a request has a Content-Type that is not accepted for the protocol or does not match the @mediaType trait in the model.

NotAcceptableException#

NotAcceptableException represents HTTP error 406, returned when a request's Accept header does not match the type used to serialize protocol responses, or when it does not match the response payload's @mediaType value.