Spring 3.0 HEAD Requests

Question

Hi

recently we moved to spring 3.0 Controller handling like this:

@Controller
public class MyController
{
   @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST)
   protected String onSubmit ( Form form, Errors errors)
   {
        // handle POST
   }

   @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET)
   protected void getForm ( Form form )
  {
     // handle GET
  }
}

Now we are getting lots of Exceptions in our logs because of HEAD Requests.

org.springframework.web.HttpRequestMethodNotSupportedException: Request method 'HEAD' not supported
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter$ServletHandlerMethodResolver.resolveHandlerMethod(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:621)
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.invokeHandlerMethod(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:422)
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.handle(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:415)
    ...

I would like to support HEAD Requests the same way like GET Requests, but obeying the HTTP reference of course:

The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT
return a message-body in the response. The metainformation contained in the HTTP headers in response to a HEAD request SHOULD be identical to the information sent in response to a GET request. This method can be used for obtaining metainformation about the entity implied by the request without transferring the entity-body itself. This method is often used for testing hypertext links for validity, accessibility, and recent modification. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

Does anybody has an elegant solution or is there even a spring solution out-of-the-box?

I searched the web but did not find any answers to this.

Answer 1

Just add HEAD as a supported method the the request mapping:

@RequestMapping(method = {RequestMethod.GET, RequestMethod.HEAD})

Update: I think you can provide a custom class that extends AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter to be the method handler (in dispatcher-servlet.xml), and just bypass the HEAD support check there. But I'd just use the replace features of an IDE to add it.