Exception Handling

Rendering Exceptions through the Flask Handler

Flask by default contains an exception handler, which connexion’s app can proxy to with the add_error_handler method. You can hook either on status codes or on a specific exception type.

Connexion is moving from returning flask responses on errors to throwing exceptions that are a subclass of connexion.problem. So far exceptions thrown in the OAuth decorator have been converted.

Flask Error Handler Example

The goal here is to make the api returning the 404 status code when there is a NotFoundException (instead of 500)

def test_should_return_404(client):
    invalid_id = 0
    response = client.get(f"/api/data/{invalid_id}")
    assert response.status_code == 404

Firstly, it’s possible to declare what Exception must be handled

# exceptions.py
class NotFoundException(RuntimeError):
    """Not found."""

class MyDataNotFound(NotFoundException):
    def __init__(self, id):
        super().__init__(f"ID '{id}' not found.")


# init flask app
import connexion

def not_found_handler(error):
    return {
        "detail": str(error),
        "status": 404,
        "title": "Not Found",
    }, 404

def create_app():

    connexion_app = connexion.FlaskApp(
        __name__, specification_dir="../api/")
    connexion_app.add_api(
        "openapi.yaml", validate_responses=True,
        base_path="/")

    # Handle NotFoundException
    connexion_app.add_error_handler(
        NotFoundException, not_found_handler)

    app = connexion_app.app
    return app

In this way, it’s possible to raise anywhere the NotFoundException or its subclasses and we know the API will return 404 status code.

from sqlalchemy.orm.exc import NoResultFound

from .exceptions import MyDataNotFound
from .models import MyData


def get_my_data(id, token_info=None):
    try:
        data = MyData.query.filter(MyData.id == id).one()

        return {
            "id": data.id,
            "description": data.description,
        }

    except NoResultFound:
        raise MyDataNotFound(id)

Default Exception Handling

By default connexion exceptions are JSON serialized according to Problem Details for HTTP APIs

Application can return errors using connexion.problem or exceptions that inherit from both connexion.ProblemException and a werkzeug.exceptions.HttpException subclass (for example werkzeug.exceptions.Forbidden). An example of this is the connexion.exceptions.OAuthProblem exception

class OAuthProblem(ProblemException, Unauthorized):
    def __init__(self, title=None, **kwargs):
        super(OAuthProblem, self).__init__(title=title, **kwargs)

Examples of Custom Rendering Exceptions

To custom render an exception when you boot your connexion application you can hook into a custom exception and render it in some sort of custom format. For example

from flask import Response
import connexion
from connexion.exceptions import OAuthResponseProblem

def render_unauthorized(exception):
    return Response(response=json.dumps({'error': 'There is an error in the oAuth token supplied'}), status=401, mimetype="application/json")

app = connexion.FlaskApp(__name__, specification_dir='./../swagger/', debug=False, swagger_ui=False)
app.add_error_handler(OAuthResponseProblem, render_unauthorized)

Custom Exceptions

There are several exception types in connexion that contain extra information to help you render appropriate messages to your user beyond the default description and status code:

OAuthProblem

This exception is thrown when there is some sort of validation issue with the Authorisation Header

OAuthResponseProblem

This exception is thrown when there is a validation issue from your OAuth 2 Server. It contains a token_response property which contains the full http response from the OAuth 2 Server

OAuthScopeProblem

This scope indicates the OAuth 2 Server did not generate a token with all the scopes required. This contains 3 properties - required_scopes - The scopes that were required for this endpoint - token_scopes - The scopes that were granted for this endpoint