How do you set cache headers in Spring MVC?

Question

In an annotation-based Spring MVC controller, what is the preferred way to set cache headers for a specific path?

Answer 1

I just encountered the same problem, and found a good solution already provided by the framework. The org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.WebContentInterceptor class allows you to define default caching behaviour, plus path-specific overrides (with the same path-matcher behaviour used elsewhere). The steps for me were:

1. Ensure my instance of org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter does not have the "cacheSeconds" property set.

2. Add an instance of WebContentInterceptor:

   
   ...
   
       
           
               
               2592000
               
               -1
           
       
   
   ...
   
   

After these changes, responses under /foo included headers to discourage caching, responses under /cache/me included headers to encourage caching, and responses under /cache/agnostic included no cache-related headers.

---

If using a pure Java configuration:

@EnableWebMvc
@Configuration
public class WebMvcConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {
  /* Time, in seconds, to have the browser cache static resources (one week). */
  private static final int BROWSER_CACHE_CONTROL = 604800;

  @Override
  public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
    registry
     .addResourceHandler("/images/**")
     .addResourceLocations("/images/")
     .setCachePeriod(BROWSER_CACHE_CONTROL);
  }
}

See also: http://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/current/reference/html/headers.html