BindException thrown instead of MethodArgumentNotValidException in REST application

Question

I have a simple Spring Rest Controller with some validation. My understanding is that validation failures would throw a MethodArgumentNotValidException. However, my code throws

Answer 1

The problem was with my curl command.

curl -d sends the Content-Type "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". As a result, Spring interprets the data as web form data (instead of JSON). Spring uses FormHttpMessageConverter to convert body of POST into domain object and results in a BindException.

What we want is for Spring to treat POST data as JSON and use the MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter to parse body of POST into object. This can be done by specifying the "Content-Type" header with curl command:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"name":"name1", "due":"2014-DEC-31 01:00:00 PDT", "category":"demo"}' http://localhost:8080/tasks

See this post for how to post JSON data using curl: How to POST JSON data with Curl from Terminal/Commandline to Test Spring REST?

Also, here's the relevant Spring documentation about MessageConverters: http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-ann-requestbody http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/remoting.html#rest-message-conversion