Spring 3.x JSON status 406 “characteristics not acceptable according to the request ”accept“ headers ()”

Question

Upon trying to get my response in JSON using Spring 3.x, I get the 406 error \"The resource identified by this request is only capable

Answer 1

I have also just experienced this same issue. It would appear it is an issue with the latest 3.2.0.RELEASE, as I previously had 3.1.2.RELEASE and it all worked. After changing to 3.2.0.RELEASE it breaks. Have tested with 3.1.3.RELEASE and that works fine. So for now I would suggest rolling back to 3.1.3.RELEASE

EDIT: Thanks to another post on this site that linked to the following location: http://static.springsource.org/spring-framework/docs/3.2.x/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-config-content-negotiation

I've now got it working by disabling the getting of media type based on the extension of the requested path. This can be done by the following:

<mvc:annotation-driven content-negotiation-manager="contentNegotiationManager"/>
<bean id="contentNegotiationManager" class="org.springframework.web.accept.ContentNegotiationManagerFactoryBean">
    <!-- Turn off working out content type based on URL file extension, should fall back to looking at the Accept headers -->
    <property name="favorPathExtension" value="false" />
</bean>

And specify version 3.2 for all the xsd schema locations.

And this is using the following jackson jars:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.2</version>
</dependency>

Answer 2

I had this problem in Spring MVC 4. Adding jackson-annotations, jackson-core and jackson-databind didn't solve the problem. Try this libs:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
  <version>2.1.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
  <version>2.1.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.jackson</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-mapper-asl</artifactId>
  <version>1.9.13</version>
</dependency>

Answer 3

I had a similar problem, it got resolved when I added jackson-databind library.

These are my dependencies:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.jackson</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-mapper-asl</artifactId>
    <version>1.9.12</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
    <version>2.4.3</version>
</dependency>

Answer 4

I had similar issue but it was weird. I will explain how I resolved it.

In my web.xml my dispacher servlet was mapped to *.htm

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>mvc-dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

and no matter what I did it always threw -

The resource identified by this request is only capable of generating responses with characteristics not acceptable according to the request "accept" header

Finally I changed it to

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>mvc-dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

and it worked. What I think is when you just specify

<mvc:annotation-driven/> 

the extension takes precedence over accept header and .htm was was creating issues. And obviously I could not use xml or json since servlet itself was not mapped.

I would also like to add that produces annotation that you, spring will try to map it will accept header of the incoming request. I was making request handler method generic for json and xml. Since I am using Java 8 and Jaxb is inbuilt in Java since Java 7 no need for JAXB dependency. For json I only needed to add -

<dependency org="com.fasterxml.jackson.core" name="jackson-databind" rev="2.8.5"/>

I am using ivy for dependency management.

Answer 5

I had the same problem and the comment added by Biju Kunjummen in this answer worked for me perfectly

https://stackoverflow.com/a/12873170/20654

That is have public getters in my Java class

Answer 6

Don't make the same mistake I did, spend all day playing around with Spring configuration, when actually your object returned in a web service is not marshaling to XML correctly. It seems Spring catches a JAXB marshaling error and doesn't report it. Use this sandbox code to validate JAXB marshaling:

MyClass myclass = new MyClass();
//populate myclass here

JAXBContext context = JAXBContext.newInstance(MyClass.class);

Marshaller m = context.createMarshaller();
StringWriter w = new StringWriter();

m.marshal(myclass, w);
System.out.println(w);

This produced and displayed an exception. Fixed the cause, and my web service is available in both XML and JSON.