json - Spring MVC - HttpMediaTypeNotAcceptableException

Question

I keep getting this HttpMediaTypeNotAcceptableException error for AJAX requests when using with Spring MVC and JSON.. full stack trace of the error is..

 org.springframework.web.HttpMediaTypeNotAcceptableException: Could not find acceptable representation
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter$ServletHandlerMethodInvoker.writeWithMessageConverters(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:1032)
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter$ServletHandlerMethodInvoker.handleResponseBody(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:972)
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter$ServletHandlerMethodInvoker.getModelAndView(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:921)
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.invokeHandlerMethod(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:438)
org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.handle(AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.java:424)
org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doDispatch(DispatcherServlet.java:863)
org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doService(DispatcherServlet.java:792)
org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:851)
org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doGet(FrameworkServlet.java:756)
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:617)
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)

little googling I did shows that the request should contain something like "accept: application/json" which is does have.. here is the request headers from firebug..

Response Headers
Server  Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type    text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Length  2503
Date    Thu, 25 Aug 2011 21:00:05 GMT
Connection  close

Request Headers
Host    localhost:8080
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.20) Gecko/20110803 Firefox/3.6.20 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept  application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive  115
Connection  keep-alive
X-Requested-With    XMLHttpRequest
Referer http://localhost:8080/legaldirectory/index.html
Cookie  JSESSIONID=5C97DA19AED4D5FA17F4A58470FAA93B

Now I am completely lost at what is happening here.. what else can go wrong here to get thi error...

Answer 1

Please make sure that you have the following in your Spring xml file:

<context:annotation-config/> 

<bean id="jacksonMessageConverter" class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter"></bean>
 <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter">
<property name="messageConverters">
  <list>
    <ref bean="jacksonMessageConverter"/>
  </list>
</property>
</bean>

and all items of your POJO should have getters/setters. Hope it helps