spring - Passing data in the body of a DELETE request

Question

I have two Spring MVC controller methods. Both receive the same data in the request body (in the format of an HTLM POST form: version=3&name=product1&id=2), but one method handles PUT requests and another DELETE:

@RequestMapping(value = "ajax/products/{id}", method = RequestMethod.PUT)
@ResponseBody
public MyResponse updateProduct(Product product, @PathVariable("id") int productId) {

//...
}

@RequestMapping(value = "ajax/products/{id}", method = RequestMethod.DELETE)
@ResponseBody
public MyResponse updateProduct(Product product, @PathVariable("id") int productId) {

//...
}

In the first method, all fields of the product argument are correctly initialised. In the second, only the id field is initialised. Other fields are null or 0. (id is, probably, initialised because of the id path variable).

I can see that the HttpServletRequest object contains values for all fields in the request body (version=3&name=product1&id=2). They just are not mapped to the fields of the product parameter.

How can I make the second method work?

I also tried to use the @RequestParam annotated parameters. In the method that handles PUT requests, it works. In the DELETE method, I get an exception: org.springframework.web.bind.MissingServletRequestParameterException: Required String parameter 'version' is not present.

I need to pass data in the body of DELETE requests because the data contain a row version which is used for optimistic locking.

Answer 1

The problem is not a Spring problem, but a Tomcat problem.

By default, Tomcat will only parse arguments that are in the form style, when the HTTP method is POST (at least for version 7.0.54 that I checked but it's probably the same for all Tomcat 7 versions).

In order to be able to handle DELETE methods as well you need to set the parseBodyMethods attribute of the Tomcat Connector. The connector configuration is done in server.xml.

Your updated connector would most likely look like:

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" 
           connectionTimeout="20000"
           redirectPort="8443"
           parseBodyMethods="POST,PUT,DELETE"
           URIEncoding="UTF-8" />

Here is documentation page for configuring Tomcat connectors.

Once you setup Tomcat to parse the parameters, Spring will work just fine (although in your case you will probably need to remove @RequestBody from the controller method)