Question

I would like to somehow inject all HttpMessageConverter instances registered in Spring-MVC. I can successfully inject all that have been registered via.

private HttpMessageConverter[] converters;
@Autowired
public void setConverters(HttpMessageConverter[] converters) {
    this.converters = converters;
}

However this only injects if the converter was registered inside the context (i.e. if defined outside of <annotation-driven>).

I did figure I would try using <beans:ref inside the <annotation-driven><message-converters> but it is not supported in spring-web 3.1.

Is there some class I can inject that may have a property I could use to get converters? Ideally I’d like to see the order in the filter chain they are registered in too.

Answer 1

You are right, the message converters are directly instantiated within the RequestMappingHandlerAdapter registered using the <mvc:annotation-driven/> xml tag, and the message-converters subtag explicitly expect the bean to be defined inline.

However, a workaround is to define the handler adapter and inject in the converters this way:

<bean name="handlerAdapter" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.method.annotation.RequestMappingHandlerAdapter">
    <property name="webBindingInitializer">
        <bean class="org.springframework.web.bind.support.ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer">
            <property name="conversionService" ref="conversionService"></property>
            <property name="validator">
                <bean class="org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.LocalValidatorFactoryBean">
                    <property name="providerClass" value="org.hibernate.validator.HibernateValidator"></property>
                </bean>
            </property>
        </bean>
    </property>
    <property name="messageConverters">
        <list>
            <ref bean="byteArrayConverter"/>
            <ref bean="jaxbConverter"/>
            <ref bean="jsonConverter"/>
            <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.StringHttpMessageConverter"></bean>
            <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.ResourceHttpMessageConverter"></bean>
            <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.xml.SourceHttpMessageConverter"></bean>
            <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.xml.XmlAwareFormHttpMessageConverter"></bean>
        </list>
    </property>
</bean>

<bean name="byteArrayConverter" class="org.springframework.http.converter.ByteArrayHttpMessageConverter"></bean>
<bean name="jaxbConverter" class="org.springframework.http.converter.xml.Jaxb2RootElementHttpMessageConverter"></bean>
<bean name="jsonConverter" class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter"></bean>

<bean name="handlerMapping" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.method.annotation.RequestMappingHandlerMapping">
    <property name="useSuffixPatternMatch" value="false"></property>
</bean>