It took me a few hours to get everything working but I am quite happy at how simple it really is.
I read this blog post that had most of the instructions on how to do it: Spring MVC with JSON via Jackson 2.0
Norris mentions that you need to make sure that you have the jackson-databind dependency otherwise you will get a 406 error. I was getting a 406 error even with the jackson databind because I did not have the mvc:annotation-driven specified. I assumed I had it and was surprised that it was not there (lost an hour to something so trivial).
I was also not sure how to submit a JSON post to the API that I was creating to validate that it worked. I found a few example but the one that worked for me was this answer on stackoverflow: Parsing JSON into Java objects in spring-mvc.
The other testing I needed to do was what the JSON message format was to send to Spring. I tried something like:
{ objectName: [ {“field1”: “value”, “field2”: “value”} ] }
But that was giving me 400 errors.
The JSON message format that works is:
{ “field1”: “value1”, “field2”: “value2” }
Note that I am submitting only 1 object at a time to the API.
The last error that I encountered is that I had an internal class for the status (return object on submission) that was private. I got a 500 error when the spring bean was trying to access it so I switched to a protected class and everything is working.
I like the short code that Spring allows me to write to get this to work. Should make it quite easy to maintain.
