Spring 3.0 Java REST return PDF document

java, model-view-controller, rest, spring

Solution

You can define your method to take in explicit `HttpServletRequest` and `HttpServletResponse` and stream to the HttpServletResponse directly, this way:

@RequestMapping(value="/pdfmethod", produces="application/pdf")
public void pdfMethod(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response){
    response.setContentType("application/pdf");
    InputStream inputStream = null;
    OutputStream outputStream = null;
    try{
        inputStream = getInputStreamFromYourPdfFile();
        outputStream = response.getOutputStream();
        IOUtils.copy(inputStream, outputStream);
    }catch(IOException ioException){
        //Do something or propagate up..
    }finally{
        IOUtils.closeQuietly(inputStream);
        IOUtils.closeQuietly(outputStream);
    }
}

Problem

I have a PDF document generated in the backend. I want to return this using Spring MVC REST framework. What should the MarshallingView and ContentNegotiatingViewResolver look like? Based on a sample I found, the controller would have this as the return: ``` return new ModelAndView(XML_VIEW_NAME, "object", byteArrayResponseContainingThePDFDocument); ``` -thank you.

Original source