The requestStatus value is set to SUCCESS when an unexpectedError exception occurs. Since the requestStatus value is used to determine the outcome of the request the receiver will not recognize that the result was actually not successful as reported, but rather an exception occurred. As it stands now the only way to detect an exception is to ignore the requestStatus value and look for the presence of fixed.unexpectedError.

Here is how this happens:

in CMSServlet.service a new CMSRequest object is created, it's status (e.g. mStatus) is initialized to SUCCESS. It is assigned to the cmsRequest variable.

The cmsRequest object is passed to the servlet's process() method. If an exception occurs while in the process() method control returns immediately to the catch block for EBaseException, which then passes the same cmsRequest object to renderException().

renderException then calls the getTemplateParameters() method from the GenUnexpectedErrorTemplateFiller class passing the same cmsRequest object. It gets the status from the cmsRequest object via getStatus(), which since it's never been modified since the object was created is still SUCCESS. So it inserts a requestStatus value of SUCCESS into the CMSTemplateParams it will subsequently returns.

CMSServlet.renderException() and GenUnexpectedErrorTemplateFiller.getTemplateParameters() should probably both force the status to CMSRequest.EXCEPTION by calling cmsRequest.setStatus(CMSRequest.EXCEPTION) since by the time either of these routines are called it's a given the status should be CMSRequest.EXCEPTION no matter what the current value of CMSRequest.mStatus is.