Content negotiation in Spring MVC

Question

I am writing a RESTful web application with Spring 3, and part of my application needs to process the data according to the requested media type.

@RequestMap         


        

Answer 1

The @RequestMapping annotation has an optional headers attribute that allows you to narrow the mapping to requests with specific headers, e.g. to match XML:

@RequestMapping(value = "/something", headers = "content-type=application/xml")

You can also specify multiple variants:

@RequestMapping(value = "/something", headers = [{"content-type=application/xml","content-type=text/xml"}])

It's a little bit low level, but does the job.

Answer 2

Although skaffman's answer is correct, I found in the latest Spring release (3.1 M2), there is an alternative and better way to do this, using consumes and produces values:

@RequestMapping(value="/pets", consumes="application/json")
public void addPet(@RequestBody Pet pet, Model model) {
    // ...
}

@Controller
@RequestMapping(value = "/pets/{petId}", produces="application/json")
@ResponseBody
public Pet getPet(@PathVariable String petId, Model model) {
    // ...
}

Please check out more details here: http://blog.springsource.com/2011/06/13/spring-3-1-m2-spring-mvc-enhancements-2/

Update:

Here are the official Spring documentation about this:

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.0.M2/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-ann-requestmapping-consumes

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.0.M2/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-ann-requestmapping-produces