How to set the charset with JAX-RS?

Question

How can I set the charset with JAX-RS? I've tried @Produces("text/html; charset=UTF-8") but that was ignored and only text/html was send with the HTTP header. I want to set the charset within a MessageBodyWriter, but don't want to extract the media type by analysing the @Produces annotation via reflection by myself.

Answer 1

If you want to do this in a JAX-RS implementation neutral way, you may be able to reset the Content-Type in the MessageBodyWriter. Something like:

public void writeTo(Object obj,
                    Class<?> cls,
                    Type type,
                    Annotation[] annotations,
                    MediaType mt,
                    MultivaluedMap<String, Object> responseHttpHeaders,
                    OutputStream stream) throws IOException {
    responseHttpHeaders.putSingle(javax.ws.rs.core.HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE, mt.toString() + ";charset=UTF-8");
}

If you have different character sets besides UTF-8 per resource method, you may want to create a custom annotation and add it to each resource method. Then, try to use the annotations parameter in the writeTo() method.

Just FYI, Apache Wink supports the usage of charset and other attributes on media types. I hope that future JAX-RS spec revisions makes this easier.