Question

I’m creating a RESTful API that returns JSON or XML depending on the Accept header (application/json vs text/xml). I have this working fine for JSON but can’t seem to get it working when for XML. I am testing using the Poster plugin client for Firefox.

I was under the impression that I just needed to add the Jackson and JAXB libraries to the app’s classpath. Again, it works for JSON but not XML.

Originally I was getting 406 error when sending the Accept “text/xml” header. Then I added @XmlRootElement(name="contact") to my entity and now I’m getting a 500 error. Should I need to put @XmlRootElement on every entity?

Although the response is a 500 error, I don’t see any errors reported in the console. I’m testing in Eclipse running Tomcat 7. Shouldn’t i see some error in the console when i receive a 500 error?

My “mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml” has <mvc:annotation-driven />

Here’s the relevant code from my controller:

    @Controller
@RequestMapping("/contacts")
public class ContactsController {

    @Autowired
    ContactsService contactsService;

    @RequestMapping(value="/{id}",
                method=RequestMethod.GET,
                headers = {"Accept=application/json, text/xml"})
    public @ResponseBody Contact getContact(@PathVariable("id") int id) {
        Contact queryContact = new Contact(id);
        Contact result = contactsService.getContact(queryContact); 
        return result;
    }
}

The “mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml” is really simple. Do I need anything other than:

    <context:component-scan base-package="contactsapp.web.controller" />
<mvc:annotation-driven />
<mvc:resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/resources/"/>

I’m using Spring 3.1 and the following:

    <dependency org="com.sun.xml.bind" name="jaxb-impl" rev="2.2.5-b10" conf="runtime->default"/>
<dependency org="org.codehaus.jackson" name="jackson-mapper-asl" rev="1.7.1" conf="runtime->default"/>

Answer 1

It turns out I had it configured correctly. Once I enabled more verbose logging I realized I had circular dependencies in my entity classes and had to add @XmlTransient on those fields