HTTP 405 (Method not supported) returned when 404 Status (Not Found) was expected [SPR-7345]

[spring-projects-issues]

Keith Donald opened SPR-7345 and commented

Scenario:

• Sent a HTTP request for text/html content
• @RequestMapping only matches text/plain content
• A 405 status code was returned when I had expected a 404

This can be reproduced by running the demo application here:
https://src.springsource.org/svn/spring-samples/mvc-showcase

Deploy the application can click on the "GET /simple/textonly" link to see the 405 returned. See the org.springframework.samples.mvc.simple.SimpleControllerRevisited for the @Controller implementation.

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Affects: 3.0.3

Issue Links:

• HTTP 405 (Method not supported) returned when 406 Status (Not Acceptable) was expected [SPR-7379] #12037 HTTP 405 (Method not supported) returned when 406 Status (Not Acceptable) was expected
• Add equivalent of JAX-RS @Produces to Spring MVC [SPR-7353] #12012 Add equivalent of JAX-RS @Produces to Spring MVC

Referenced from: commits spring-attic/spring-framework-issues@4c4b3ef

[spring-projects-issues]

Keith Donald commented

The way I implemented the "produces" contract was by using the "headers" attribute of @RequestMapping:

@RequestMapping(value="/simple/textonly", method=RequestMethod.GET, headers="Accept=text/plain")
public @ResponseBody String simple() {
	return "Hello world!";
}

Thinking about it more , this arguably isn't the same as saying @Produces("text/plain"). Specifically, with the code above, if the Accept header was not set to "text/plain", one would expect this @RequestMapping rule to never match, and RESOURCE_NOT_FOUND (404) to be returned. OTOH, with @Produces, you're explicitly setting the acceptable content types; if a client does not support one of them, you'd expect the server to respond with NOT_ACCEPTABLE (406) then.

What seems like a bug is the fact a METHOD_NOT_SUPPORTED (405) is currently returned.

Do we need a separate New Feature JIRA for @Produces-equivalent functionality?