Spring WebFlux Broken Stream Error Handling - server-sent-events

Question

I'm struggling to find any good examples on how to implement error handling with Spring WebFlux.
The use case I want to handle is notifying HTTP clients that a stream has terminated unexpectedly. What I have found it that with the out of the box behaviour, when a stream is terminated, for example by raising a RuntimeException after x items have been processed, is handled too gracefully! The client is flushed all items up until the exception is raised, and then the connection is closed. As far as the client is concerned the request was successful. The following code shows how this has been setup:
public Mono<ServerResponse> getItems(ServerRequest request) {
Counter counter = new Counter(0);
return ServerResponse
.ok()
.contentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_STREAM_JSON)
.body(operations.find(query, Document.class, "myCollection")
.map(it -> {
counter.increment();
if(counter.getCount() > 500) {
throw new RuntimeException("an error has occurred");
}
return it;
}), Document.class);
}
What is the recommended way to handle the error and notify the HTTP client that the stream terminated unexpectedly?

Answer 1

It really depends on how you'd like to communicate that failure to the client. Should the client display some specific error message? Should the client reconnect automatically?
If this is a "business error" that doesn't prevent you from writing to the stream, you could communicate that failure using a specific event type (look at the Server Sent Events spec).
Spring WebFlux supports ServerSentEvent<T>, which allows you to control various fields such as event, id, comment and data (the actual data). Using an Flux::onErrorMap operator, you could write a specific ServerSentEvent that has an "error" event type (look at the ServerSentEvent.builder() for more).
But this is not transparent to the client, as you'd have to subscribe to specific events and change your JavaScript code otherwise you may display error messages as regular messages.