Spring-MVC 406 Not Acceptable instead of JSON Response

Question

I'm trying to return a JSON response with Spring 3.0.6, but I get a 406 response "Not Acceptable", with the description: "The resource identified by this request is only capable of generating responses with characteristics not acceptable according to the request "accept" headers ()."

I know that a very similar question has been asked before, but I can't make it work for my project, despite many tests and I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.

In my Maven pom.xml I've the following:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.jackson</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-mapper-asl</artifactId>
  <version>1.8.5</version>
  <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.jackson</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-core-asl</artifactId>
  <version>1.8.5</version>
  <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>

In web.xml I reference webmvc-config.xml, and the log confirms that is loaded.

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>mainServlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/spring/webmvc-config.xml</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

In webmvc-config.xml I've the following:

    <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
            <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/" />
            <property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
    </bean> 
    <mvc:annotation-driven />

My Controller is:

@Controller
public class ClassifiedController {

    @RequestMapping(value = "/classified/{idClassified}", headers = "Accept=*/*",
                    method = RequestMethod.GET)
    @ResponseBody
    public final Classified getClassified(@PathVariable final int idClassified) {
        ...

I tried with or without the headers parameter with the same results. If I call the URL directly with Firefox the Request Headers contain the following (checked with firebug):

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

If I use the following JQuery:

$.ajax({
        url: '/classified/38001',
        type: 'GET',
        dataType: 'json'
});

The following headers are sent:

Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01

In both cases the result is a 406 error. I don't know what else should I check to make it work.

UPDATE: I decided to debug through Spring and I found out that Jackson was called correctly and in org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.StdSerializerProvider the method _findExplicitUntypedSerializer contains the following code:

try {
    return _createAndCacheUntypedSerializer(runtimeType, property);
} catch (Exception e) {
    return null;
}

This is unfortunate because hides the source of the problem. With the debugger I found out that that exception contained a very descriptive error message:

Conflicting getter definitions for property "reminded": 
ClassifiedImpl#isReminded(0 params) vs
ClassifiedImpl#getReminded(0 params)

Now that I see the error message is a silly mistake and easy to fix, but without that it wasn't that obvious. In fact, fixing the problem, leaded to a working serialization.

did you check encoding of output / i think their is some limit in json heder content — nidhin, Sep 19 '11 at 15:44
Is `Accept` correct for the `@RequestMapping` annotation? http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-ann-requestmapping-advanced - might suggest "`content-type`". — Paul Grime, Sep 19 '11 at 15:45
Do you have another AnnotationHandlerMapping bean created in your context? — gkamal, Sep 19 '11 at 15:46
@nidhin, do you mean in the Request Headers? I've this: Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 — stivlo, Sep 19 '11 at 15:47
@Paul Grime, I think both are acceptable, anyway I tried with headers = "content-type=*/*" and now I've a 404. — stivlo, Sep 19 '11 at 16:01
Maybe have to debug your way through Spring. Or check your JSPs as this sounds like Spring found a controller to handle the request, but can't find a view? What view name does your Controller return? — Paul Grime, Sep 19 '11 at 16:04
@Paul Grime, I don't return any view name, since I've the ResponseBody annotation, I return a JavaBean that should be shown as JSON, and it didn't work. Your comment inspired me to try with a Map instead and that works! Thank you. I'm not sure why. Is MappingJacksonJson working only with Maps and not JavaBeans? — stivlo, Sep 19 '11 at 16:10
Does the class follow regular JavaBean conventions with getter / setters, default constructor etc.. JacksonJsonConverter works with Java Beans. — gkamal, Sep 19 '11 at 16:15
@gkamal: yes with the caveat that Classified is an interface. I tried also returning ClassifiedImpl directly, but it still gives 406. The implementation has a public default constructor, plus public getters and setters and a few other methods too. — stivlo, Sep 19 '11 at 16:24

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 11 '13 at 15:42

Add the following in DispatcherServlet-servlet.xml.

<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>

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered May 11 '15 at 12:39

I've stumbled upon the same error (406: content not acceptable) with Spring MVC and @RestController annotation.

The Spring handler:

@RequestMapping(value = "/stuff-acknowledgment/{id}", produces ="application/json;charset=UTF-8", headers="Accept=*")
public Message acknowledgeStuff(@PathVariable("id") String id, @ModelAttribute("ack") AckBean acquittement) {

Observation:

the URI has the form : http://www.host.com/stuff-acknowledgment/{id}
BUT $id has a very particular format: xxxcomplicatedhashxxx.png (or whatever extension you can think of).

Therefore:

Spring MVC interpret the extension and want to produce a result of that same mime type (even if I define it as a path variable), here an "image/png" MIME type even if I tell him to produce JSON. So a 406 exception is thrown.

Fix:

Remove the ".png" extension in the URI, or remove the PathVariable and put it in the body, or add a suffix behind the pathVariable (not tested but should work as well), the point is to avoid a file extension at the end of the URI.

P.S.: I know it doesn't answer the specific problem (with the solution in the update) in the question but I found that SO thread when searching for that problem and post my fix here for the record, hoping it can help someone in the future.

Same thing here, the endpoint had an email address at the very end which lead to interpreting TLD extension like so value=someServer/{folder}/{email} . I swapped the arguments and all was working fine .I wish i can up vote more for this answer, thanks agin :) — Java Main, Mar 19 '19 at 15:31

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 19 '11 at 16:19

6

In terms of the MappingJacksonJson processing, you'll need to make sure that the Jackson ObjectMapper supports your object type for serialisation.

answered Sep 19 '11 at 16:19

Paul Grime

14,970
4
36
58

Thank you Paul for the help, what you say makes sense. However, I tried to add the Serializable interface to my Classified interface: "public interface Classified extends Serializable" and I still have 406, in both cases: returning the interface or the concrete implementation. – stivlo Sep 19 '11 at 16:34
This isn't java.io Serialization. A Jackson Serializer needs to be registered with Jackson. Read the docs for ObjectMapper and http://jackson.codehaus.org/1.8.4/javadoc/org/codehaus/jackson/map/SerializerProvider.html. – Paul Grime Sep 19 '11 at 16:38
Dude , you're a savior . Thanks. – Samarth Nov 10 '16 at 09:08

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 26 '14 at 13:32

4

I ran into this problem because the objects that I wanted to return as JSON didn't have any getter methods for their properties. Jackson probably needs these. After adding them it worked.

answered Nov 26 '14 at 13:32

Julius

2,784
6
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score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 11 '13 at 10:55

2

although this thread is a little old...

u need to add the following (maven dependency):

org.codehaus.jacksonjackson-mapper-asl1.9.13

answered Sep 11 '13 at 10:55

eran

21
3

Spring-MVC 406 Not Acceptable instead of JSON Response

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