Spring MVC - HttpMediaTypeNotAcceptableException

Question

I keep getting this HttpMediaTypeNotAcceptableException error for AJAX requests when using with Spring MVC and JSON.. full stack trace of the error is..

 org.springframework.web.HttpMediaTypeNotAcceptableException: Could not find acceptable representation
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter$ServletHandlerMethodInvoker.writeWithMessageConverters(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:1032)
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter$ServletHandlerMethodInvoker.handleResponseBody(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:972)
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter$ServletHandlerMethodInvoker.getModelAndView(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:921)
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.invokeHandlerMethod(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:438)
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.handle(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:424)
org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doDispatch(DispatcherServlet.java:863)
org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doService(DispatcherServlet.java:792)
org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:851)
org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doGet(FrameworkServlet.java:756)
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:617)
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)

little googling I did shows that the request should contain something like "accept: application/json" which is does have.. here is the request headers from firebug..

Response Headers
Server  Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type    text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Length  2503
Date    Thu, 25 Aug 2011 21:00:05 GMT
Connection  close

Request Headers
Host    localhost:8080
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.20) Gecko/20110803 Firefox/3.6.20 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept  application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive  115
Connection  keep-alive
X-Requested-With    XMLHttpRequest
Referer http://localhost:8080/legaldirectory/index.html
Cookie  JSESSIONID=5C97DA19AED4D5FA17F4A58470FAA93B

Now I am completely lost at what is happening here.. what else can go wrong here to get thi error...

Answer 1

In your Spring @Configuration class which extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter override the method configureMessageConverters, for instance:

@Override
public void configureMessageConverters(List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> converters) {

    // http
    HttpMessageConverter converter = new StringHttpMessageConverter();
    converters.add(converter);
    logger.info("HttpMessageConverter added");

    // string
    converter = new FormHttpMessageConverter();
    converters.add(converter);
    logger.info("FormHttpMessageConverter added");

    // json
    converter = new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter();
    converters.add(converter);
    logger.info("MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter added");

}

And the error will be gone.

Answer 2

As Alex hinted in one of the answers, you could use the ContentNegotiationManagerFactoryBean to set the default content-type to "application/json", but I felt that that approach was not for me.

What I was trying to do was to post a form to a method like this

@RequestMapping(value = "/post/to/me", method = RequestMethod.POST, produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE, consumes = MediaType.MULTIPART_FORM_DATA_VALUE)
    public @ResponseBody MyJsonPOJO handlePostForm(@Valid @ModelAttribute("form") ValidateMeForm form, BindingResult bindingResult) throws ApiException {

What I instead chose to do was to change the "Accept" header of the request from the browser to "application/json", thereby making SpringMVC find my method.

Using the (not yet finalized) Javascript Fetch API:

var form = new FormData();
form.append("myData", "data");

let fetchConfig = {
    method: "POST",
    body: form,
    headers: {"Accept": "application/json"}
};

fetch("/post/to/me", fetchConfig)
    .then(... // Javascript Promise API here

Et voilà! Now SpringMVC finds the method, validates the form, and lets you return a JSON POJO.

Answer 3

In my case, just add @ResponseBody annotation to solve this issue.

Answer 4

I had the same issue, but i had figured out that basically what happens when spring is trying to render the response it will try to serialize it according to the media type you have specified and by using getter and setter methods in your class

before my class used to look like below

public class MyRestResponse{
    private String message;
}

solution looks like below

public class MyRestResponse{
    private String message;
    public void setMessage(String msg){
        this.message = msg;
    }
    public String getMessage(){
        return this.message;
    }
}

that's how it worked for me

Answer 5

Please make sure that you have the following in your Spring xml file:

<context:annotation-config/> 

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

and all items of your POJO should have getters/setters. Hope it helps

Answer 6

From: http://georgovassilis.blogspot.ca/2015/10/spring-mvc-rest-controller-says-406.html

You've got this Spring @RestController and mapped a URL that contains an email as part of the URL path. You cunningly worked around the dot truncation issue [1] and you are ready to roll. And suddenly, on some URLs, Spring will return a 406 [2] which says that the browser requested a certain content type and Spring can't serialize the response to that content type. The point is, you've been doing Spring applications for years and you did all the MVC declarations right and you included Jackson and basically you are stuck. Even worse, it will spit that error out only on some emails in the URL path, most notably those ending in a ".com" domain.

@RequestMapping(value = "/agenda/{email:.+}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public List<AgendaEntryDTO> checkAgenda(@PathVariable("email") String email)

The issue [3] is quite tricky: the application server performs some content negotiation and convinces Spring that the browser requested a "application/x-msdownload" content, despite that occurring nowhere in the request the browser actually submitted.

The solution is to specify a content negotiation manager for the web application context:

<mvc:annotation-driven enable-matrix-variables="true"
    content-negotiation-manager="contentNegotiationManager" />
<bean id="contentNegotiationManager"
    class="org.springframework.web.accept.ContentNegotiationManagerFactoryBean">
    <property name="defaultContentType" value="application/json" />
    <property name="favorPathExtension" value="false" />
    <property name="favorParameter" value="false" />
    <property name="parameterName" value="mediaType" />
    <property name="ignoreAcceptHeader" value="false" />
    <property name="useJaf" value="false" />
</bean>