Wink swallowing exceptions

Question

I am trying to implement some validation on Enum types in wink for jaxb/jackson.

I have an enum which takes some values. I want to allow a null, i.e. not set it in xml/json, but I also want to check for invalid values and give an error.

I found that by default jaxb/wink just returns a null if I supply a value not in the enum, so I tried using a setter to allow validation of the input. Using Level.valueOf(newLevel) to try and convert the supplied string to a value throws an exception and gives me a stack trace and http error. This is ok, but what I really want is a custom exception so that I can have some control over the marshalling of the error response. I tried throwing one but it gets swallowed by (I think) wink.

enum Level {BASIC, ADVANCED};

@XmlAttribute
public void setLevel(String newLevel) throws MyException {
    if (newNodeLevel != null) {
        try {
            this.level = Level.valueOf(newLevel);
        } catch (IllegalArgumentException e) {
            throw new MyException("level invalid");
        }
   }
}

Other than using a Throwable rather than an Exception, is there any way I can achieve this?