Web API does not report exceptions

[sheridancbio]

If the database is inaccessible, or other exceptions are thrown during database query, the exceptions are not seen by the end user and the api may return incorrect values. For example, the following exception was recorded on startup in a local installation but querying the Api endpoint http://localhost:8080/pdb_annotation/ProteinIdentifierRecognitionQuery?ensemblId=ENSP00000485937.1 resulted in a simple return value of "false"

Beginning of exception stacktrace:

2016-09-13 05:52:30.490 ERROR 11452 --- [ main] o.a.tomcat.jdbc.pool.ConnectionPool : Unable to create initial connections of pool.

com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLSyntaxErrorException: Unknown database 'pdbtest'
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method) ~[na:1.8.0_91]
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:62) ~[na:1.8.0_91]
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45) ~[na:1.8.0_91]
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:423) ~[na:1.8.0_91]
at com.mysql.jdbc.Util.handleNewInstance(Util.java:404) ~[mysql-connector-java-5.1.38.jar:5.1.38]
at com.mysql.jdbc.Util.getInstance(Util.java:387) ~[mysql-connector-java-5.1.38.jar:5.1.38]