Exception handling - gracefully exit

Question

I've a REST service which in turn consumes a SOAP WebService. Incase if i get an exception while calling the SOAP WS, what kind of exception to be thrown from REST service ? Will it be RuntimeException with http status code 500 ? Or should i gracefully exit by giving a proper error message and code as response to the caller, if so, what would be the http status code in this case ?

Answer 1

If you get an exception from the SOAP service, I would say that returning an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error is the only legal response to give to the caller of the REST service. Anything else would be misleading.