What is the preferred way to specify an HTTP "Location" Response Header in Spring MVC 3?

Question

What is the preferred way to specify an HTTP "Location" Response Header in Spring MVC 3?

As far as I can tell, Spring will only provide a "Location" in response to a redirect ("redirect:xyz" or RedirectView), however there are scenarios where a Location should be sent along with the entity body (ex, as a result of a "201 Created").

I'm afraid my only option is manually specifying it:

httpServletResponse.setHeader("Location", "/x/y/z");

Is this correct? Is there a better way to tackle this problem?

Answer 1

That's the good way of doing it, and it conforms to the http specs.

Answer 2

Yes, that is correct and standards-compliant.

Answer 3

According to: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.30

Absolute URI should be used:

Location       = "Location" ":" absoluteURI  

And the URI should be escaped properly:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

Answer 4

Your approach seems fine, but to keep it clean you could put the code inside a custom HandlerInterceptor that only triggers when there's an HTTP 201, for example.

See here for more information.