Spring MVC: How to return custom 404 errorpages?

I'm looking for a clean way to return customized 404 errorpages in Spring 4 when a requested resource was not found. Queries to different domain types should result in different error pages.

Here some code to show my intention (Meter is a domain class):

@RequestMapping(value = "/{number}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String getMeterDetails(@PathVariable("number") final Long number, final Model model) {
    final Meter result = meterService.findOne(number);
    if (result == null) {
        // here some code to return an errorpage
    }

    model.addAttribute("meter", result);
    return "meters/details";
}

I imagine several ways for handling the problem. First there would be the possibility to create RuntimeExceptions like

@ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND)
public class MeterNotFoundExcption extends RuntimeException { }

and then use an exception handler to render a custom errorpage (maybe containing a link to a list of meters or whatever is appropriate).

But I don't like polluting my application with many small exceptions.

Another possibility would be using HttpServletResponse and set the statuscode manually:

@RequestMapping(value = "/{number}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String getMeterDetails(@PathVariable("number") final Long number, final Model model,
final HttpServletResponse response) {
    final Meter meter = meterService.findOne(number);
    if (meter == null) {
        response.setStatus(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND.value());
        return "meters/notfound";
    }

    model.addAttribute("meter", meter);
    return "meters/details";
}

But with this solution I have to duplicate the first 5 lines for many controller methods (like edit, delete).

Is there an elegant way to prevent duplicating these lines many times?

Solution

The solution is much simpler than thought. One can use one generic ResourceNotFoundException defined as follows:

public class ResourceNotFoundException extends RuntimeException { }

then one can handle errors within every controller with an ExceptionHandler annotation:

class MeterController {
    // ...
    @ExceptionHandler(ResourceNotFoundException.class)
    @ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND)
    public String handleResourceNotFoundException() {
        return "meters/notfound";
    }

    // ...

    @RequestMapping(value = "/{number}/edit", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public String viewEdit(@PathVariable("number") final Meter meter,
                           final Model model) {
        if (meter == null) throw new ResourceNotFoundException();

        model.addAttribute("meter", meter);
        return "meters/edit";
    }
}

Every controller can define its own ExceptionHandler for the ResourceNotFoundException.