Question

I am writing a Spring Restful webservices application using Spring MVC. I have used content negotiating viewer to respond multiple data formats for eg. If some one requests a URL with .xml extension an XML will be sent in response body similarly if someone requests with an .json extension, an json will be sent in response body.

Now, I want the same process inwards, say if some body wants to post a Json or xml or a simple post from a webpage form using post method to same action, it should be able to handle all these.

This way i will be able to write a Web Service+Web Application in a single Spring MVC+Restful Application.

Thanks in advance for the help 🙂

Answer 1

You can use headers attribute of @RequestMapping annotation.

@RequestMapping(value = "/pets", method = RequestMethod.POST, headers="content-type=text/*")

to narrow content-type of requests your method is going to serve.

edit:

If you want to sent different content type in request body, then the only thing you need to do is to define MessageConverter (I assume you already did that) and annotate your method parameter with

@RequestBody 

Spring should deserialize the body of your request using the MessageConverter you defined.

So assuming you have something like:

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter">
    <property name="messageConverters">
        <util:list>
            <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter"/>
        </util:list>
    </property>
</bean>

<bean id="contentNegotiatingViewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.ContentNegotiatingViewResolver">
    <property name="mediaTypes">
        <util:map>
            <entry key="json" value="application/json"/>
        </util:map>
    </property>
    <property name="defaultViews">
        <util:list>
            <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.json.MappingJacksonJsonView"/>
        </util:list>
    </property>
</bean>

in your spring context.

Annotating your method like this:

@RequestMapping(method=PUT, value="/user/{user_id}")
public void putUser(@RequestBody User user, @PathVariable int user_id) {
    ...
}

should do the job.