How do you implement retry with a custom exception condition using RetryPolicy?

Sometimes the retry decision cannot be based on exception type alone — it needs to inspect the exception message, error code inside the exception, or a response payload embedded in a custom exception. In this case, you implement a custom RetryPolicy or use SimpleRetryPolicy with a map and a subclass override.

Custom policy inspecting exception detail:

public class HttpStatusRetryPolicy extends SimpleRetryPolicy {

    public HttpStatusRetryPolicy(int maxAttempts) {
        super(maxAttempts, Collections.singletonMap(MyApiException.class, true));
    }

    @Override
    public boolean canRetry(RetryContext context) {
        Throwable t = context.getLastThrowable();
        if (t instanceof MyApiException ex) {
            // Only retry on 503 or 429, not on 4xx
            int status = ex.getStatusCode();
            boolean retryable = (status == 503 || status == 429);
            return retryable && context.getRetryCount() < getMaxAttempts();
        }
        return super.canRetry(context);
    }
}

Register it on RetryTemplate:

RetryTemplate template = new RetryTemplate();
template.setRetryPolicy(new HttpStatusRetryPolicy(4));
template.setBackOffPolicy(new ExponentialBackOffPolicy());

This pattern is valuable when integrating with APIs that return domain-specific error codes inside the exception, where a 400 with error code RATE_LIMITED should be retried but a 400 with INVALID_INPUT should not.

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