Why is @HeadMapping unavailable in Spring MVC?

Question

The following annotations are included in the Spring Framework:
@GetMapping, @PostMapping, @PutMapping, @DeleteMapping and @PatchMapping for standard Spring MVC controller methods. However @HeadMapping is not. What's the point about this?

Answer 1

According to W3 Standard for HEAD Request

9.4 HEAD

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.

It is a Request Method that is similar to GET but should not return a Body. Thus your GET method will effectively handle the HEAD method also but with the exception of not returning a response body.

So ideally you can use @GetMapping to handle HEAD request methods and can have a Filter to avoid returning the response back to the calling client as discussed in this post

Answer 2

You could always fall back to the @RequestMapping. This annotation supports all kind of HTTP methods. So @RequestMapping(method = { RequestMethod.HEAD }) does do the job!

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If you really want to use @HeadMapping, you can create it yourself:

@target({ ElementType.METHOD})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Documented
@RequestMapping(method = { RequestMethod.HEAD})
public @interface HeadMapping {
    @AliasFor(annotation = RequestMapping.class)
    String name() default "";

    @AliasFor(annotation = RequestMapping.class)
    String[] value() default {};

    @AliasFor(annotation = RequestMapping.class)
    String[] path() default {};

    @AliasFor(annotation = RequestMapping.class)
    String[] params() default {};

    @AliasFor(annotation = RequestMapping.class)
    String[] headers() default {};

    @AliasFor(annotation = RequestMapping.class)
    String[] consumes() default {};

    @AliasFor(annotation = RequestMapping.class)
    String[] produces() default {};
}