Changing httpresponse status on netty - http-headers

Question

The api is streaming large volume of data. after performing validation and opening up the connection to backend then creating the jdbc statement, we return httpresponse ok status with the header. The problem we see is that when the streaming breaks, the client does not get error code and only thing we can do is just close the channel.
Here is how we send the status back at the begining;
HttpResponse response = new DefaultHttpResponse(HTTP_1_1, OK);
response.headers().set(CONTENT_TYPE, MimeTypes.TEXT_JSON_UTF_8);
response.setChunked(true);
response.headers().set(Names.TRANSFER_ENCODING, Values.CHUNKED);
Channel ch = ctx.getChannel();
// Write the initial line and the header.
ch.write(response);
When anything fails during the streaming, the error is captured by the catch block;
} catch (Exception e) {
ctx.getChannel().close();
String msg = "Error while streaming dynamic content from backend datasource " + ((DatasetDynamic) datasets[0]).getDbDataSourceName();
error(e, msg);
debug("uriNodes=" + this.uriNodes + "; params=" + this.params);
throw new Exception(msg, e);
} finally {
As you see in the catch block, to notify the client, something went wrong, all it is doing is;ctx.getChannel().close();
Is there anyway we can send proper httpresponse with error back to the client?

Answer 1

Looks like you can send httpresponse anytime thru the channel, it does not have to be as header;
} catch (Exception e) {
// Any exception here means an error in the middle of chunk streaming, we
// send back http 500 to the client to inform the failure
ResponseErrorStatus status = new ResponseErrorStatus(ServiceErrorStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR,
" error: " + e.getMessage() + (e.getCause() != null ? (" - caused by: " + e.getCause().getMessage()) : ""));
HttpResponse response = new DefaultHttpResponse(HTTP_1_1, status.serviceErrorStatus.httpStatus);
Channel ch = ctx.getChannel();
ch.write(response);