Spring-mvc controller and exception handling

I would say you have three strategies depending on your use case.

There are roughly three strategies: HandlerExceptionResolver, @ExceptionHandler and handling exceptions internally within action.

The use cases for these are: common exception handler for whole application, whole controller, specific action accordingly.

I would say best practice would be to use @ExceptionHandler. As the downside to handling the exception in the controller method is that it makes the code less readable and might be repeated across many controller methods.

I would recommend having a base class for your controllers with the @ExceptionHandler defined. This way it can be used for many different controllers, without any code duplication. This would be more readable than the exception resolver approach, but could be used in conjunction.