Spring REST returning PDF - Response status 406 (not acceptable)

Question

I read many questions on SO about this type of issue, but all of them recommend using the correct Jackson version. This is my current situation:

REST API:

@RequestMapping(value = "get/pdf/{id}", headers="Accept=*/*", method = RequestMethod.GET, produces = "application/pdf")
    @Override
    public ResponseEntity<InputStream> getPdfContractById(@PathVariable("id") Long id);

Using Accept:*/* produces an error in mapping the request (404 occurs)

From my pom:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
        <artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
        <version>2.4.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
        <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
        <version>2.4.1.1</version>
    </dependency>

I also tried to add these two dependencies, but nothing changes:

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

Response client-side: There was an unexpected error (type=Not Acceptable, status=406).Headers incude:

    Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding:gzip, deflate, sdch

What's wrong with it?

---

More details

I am using this code to return the remote PDF file:

    URL url = null;
    try {
        url = new URL(urlStr);
    } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        throw new MyException(e.getMessage());
    }
    InputStream pdfFile = null;
    try {
        pdfFile = url.openStream();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        throw new MyException(e.getMessage());
    }

    ResponseEntity<InputStream> re = ResponseEntity
            .ok()
                    //     .headers(headers)
                    //     .contentLength(contentLength)
            .contentType(
                    MediaType.parseMediaType("application/pdf"))
            .body(pdfFile);
   return re;

Answer 1

Basically there is no need to add produces = "application/pdf" in RequestMapping as it seems to try to convert the ResponeBody internally. You can just add MediaType to response headers which is what you need.

@ResponseBody
@RequestMapping(value = "get/pdf/{id}", headers="Accept=*/*", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public ResponseEntity<InputStreamResource> getPdfContractById(@PathVariable("id") Long id){
        // Get the remove file based on the fileaddress
        RemoteFile remotefile = new RemoteFile(id);

        // Set the input stream
        InputStream inputstream = remotefile.getInputStream();
        // asume that it was a PDF file
        HttpHeaders responseHeaders = new HttpHeaders();
        InputStreamResource inputStreamResource = new InputStreamResource(inputStream);
        responseHeaders.setContentLength(contentLengthOfStream);
        responseHeaders.setContentType(MediaType.valueOf("application/pdf"));
        // just in case you need to support browsers
        responseHeaders.put("Content-Disposition", Collections.singletonList("attachment; filename=somefile.pdf"))
        return new ResponseEntity<InputStreamResource> (inputStreamResource,
                                   responseHeaders,
                                   HttpStatus.OK);
}