Custom HTTP Message Converter Not Being Used, 415 Unsupproted Media Type

Question

I am creating a test application to achieve conversion from XML String to Employee object before being passed to the controller. I don\'t want to use JAXB converter because

Answer 1

1. Set Media Type

Comparing your implementation with some HttpMessageConverter implementations provided by Spring (for example ´MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter´), shows that you missed to define the supportedMediaTypes.

The common way* of HttpMessageConverter that extends AbstractHttpMessageConverter<T> is to set the media type in the constructor, by using the super constructor AbstractHttpMessageConverter.(MediaType supportedMediaType).

 public class EmployeeConverter extends AbstractHttpMessageConverter<Employee> {
      public EmployeeConverter() {
            super(new MediaType("text", "xml", Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
      }
 }

BTW 1: you can also register more then one media type**

super(MediaType.APPLICATION_XML,
      MediaType.TEXT_XML,
      new MediaType("application", "*+xml")); 

BTW 2: for xml conterter one should think extending from AbstractXmlHttpMessageConverter<T>

2. Register you Converter

<mvc:annotation-driven>
    <mvc:message-converters>
       ...
       <bean class="com.example.YourConverter"/>
    </mvc:message-converters>
</mvc:annotation-driven>

The major drawback of <mvc:message-converters> is, that this replace the default configuration, so you must also register all default HttpMessageConverter explicit.

To keep the default message convertes you need to use: <mvc:message-converters register-defaults="true">...

• *used by the other implementations like MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter´
• **example take from AbstractXmlHttpMessageConverter<T>