Catch 404 Error in API

Hi @jlrdw I think I didn't explained my self very well. This is not actually related to authentications or tokens. Authentication is working fine as well as authorization all of this using tokens.

Regarding change_status this is just a url part as I stated in the route

/v1/activations/change_status/{activation}

Activation is just a Model that is related to DB table activations which has an activation_status_id field that has the current activation status (which by the way is what this API resource is intended for the change the activation current status to a new status).

When I send a valid activation_id the action is working as expected. The controller action loads the correct activation from the database in the $activation parameter. Then the action is performed and corresponding response is returned.

The thing is that when I send an invalid activation_id (one that doesn't exist in the database) then API call is throwing error 404 which is correct but is it sending that before reaching the action controller body so I am not able to catch it and compose a JSON response. As a result an HTML response is being sent back to Postman.

How can I catch this error and send a correct JSON response?

This looks like the correct way to do it but I tried it and I am still getting an HTML response instead of a JSON response.

See my app/Exceptions/Handler.php class below

<?php

namespace App\Exceptions;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\ModelNotFoundException;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Exceptions\Handler as ExceptionHandler;
use Throwable;

class Handler extends ExceptionHandler
{
    /**
     * The list of the inputs that are never flashed to the session on validation exceptions.
     *
     * @var array<int, string>
     */
    protected $dontFlash = [
        'current_password',
        'password',
        'password_confirmation',
    ];

    /**
     * Register the exception handling callbacks for the application.
     */
    public function register(): void
    {
        $this->reportable(function (Throwable $e) {
            //
        });
    }

    public function render($request, Throwable $exception)
    {
        if ($exception instanceof ModelNotFoundException && $request->wantsJson())
        {
            return response()->json([
                'success' => false,
                'message' => 'Not found!'
            ], 404);
        }

        return parent::render($request, $exception);
    }
}

I tried using

public function render($request, Exception $exception)

as stated in that solution but Laravel was telling me that the render function was not compatible and when I saw the parent render it was Throwable rather than Exception so I changed it to Throwable.