I’m trying to have Spring return a HTTP status using only @ResponseStatus directly on my custom exception like so:

@ResponseStatus(code = HttpStatus.EXPECTATION_FAILED)
public class UserAlreadyExistsException extends RuntimeException {
    public UserAlreadyExistsException(final String email) {
        super(String.format("User with email=%s already exists", email));
    }
}

But it doesn’t work, it always returns a 403. Whereas when I add a handler method in a ControllerAdvice it works as desired:

@ControllerAdvice
public class GlobalExceptionHandler {
    @ResponseStatus(code = HttpStatus.EXPECTATION_FAILED)
    @ExceptionHandler(UserAlreadyExistsException.class)
    public void handleUserAlreadyExistsException(UserAlreadyExistsException e) {
    }
}

I don’t understand why. I also tried to remove the controller completely thinking its presence might interfere in the catching of the exception but it doesn’t work either.