Question

I have a method in my Controller which looks like this:

@RequestMapping(value = "/test", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public @ResponseBody String getNameAsXML(HttpServletRequest httpRequest, @RequestParam("name") String name)
{
    ... some logic goes here to get the data from the db 
     by name and convert it to valid xml string
    ...
        return xmlString;
}

xmlString is a String representation of the xml I want to return.

When I run this method I can see the xml in the browser however I would like instead to give the user a download popup to allow him to download this as an xml file instead of showing it inside the browser.

I thought about returning MultipartFile instead of String but not quite sure how to do it.

Answer 1

This can be achieved by setting the “Content-Disposition” in the response header to “attachment=”. It’s good practice to set the response type to the correct MIME type (“text/xml”). This might already be done automatically, however.