Content negotiation [SPR-5452]

[spring-projects-issues]

Arjen Poutsma opened SPR-5452 and commented

Spring-MVC currently let's the server decide which view to render for a given request, through it's View, view name and ViewResolver abstractions. In a more RESTful scenario, it is a best practice to let the client decide the representation, via the "Accept" HTTP header. The server responds with the delivered representation via the "Content-Type" header.

One issue with the "Accept" header is that is impossible to change it in a web browser; it is always fixed to "text/html, image/gif", etc. Looking at the file extension is a good workaround, i.e. http://example.com/hotels.pdf retrieves the PDF view of the hotel list, as does http://example.com/hotels with an Accept header of "application/x-pdf".

We should create a ViewResolver which respects the client-side Accept header, but also looks at file extensions. This view resolver acts as an adapter other ViewResolvers, simply delegating to the correct one given a particular media type.

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This issue is a sub-task of #9097

Referenced from: commits df563df