405 JSP error with Put Method

spring-mvc

Solution

The problem is that when you return a view name from your controller method, the Spring `DispatcherServlet` will do a forward to the given view, preserving the original `PUT` method.

On attempting to handle this forward, Tomcat will refuse it, with the justification that a `PUT` to a JSP could be construed to mean "replace this JSP file on the server with the content of this request."

Really you want your controller to handle your `PUT` requests and then to subsequently forward to your JSPs as `GET`. Fortunately Servlet 3.0 provides a means to filter purely on the `FORWARD` dispatcher.

Create a filter:

public class GetMethodConvertingFilter implements Filter {

    @Override
    public void init(FilterConfig config) throws ServletException {
        // do nothing
    }

    @Override
    public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain)
        throws IOException, ServletException {

        chain.doFilter(wrapRequest((HttpServletRequest) request), response);
    }

    @Override
    public void destroy() {
        // do nothing
    }

    private static HttpServletRequestWrapper wrapRequest(HttpServletRequest request) {
        return new HttpServletRequestWrapper(request) {
            @Override
            public String getMethod() {
                return "GET";
            }
        };
    }
}

And wire it into your `web.xml` thusly:

<filter>
    <filter-name>getMethodConvertingFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>my.GetMethodConvertingFilter</filter-class>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>getMethodConvertingFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    <dispatcher>FORWARD</dispatcher>
</filter-mapping>

This will convert requests to `GET` on forward only, leaving requests through other dispatchers unchanged, so `PUT`s will get intercepted by your controllers as normal.

My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that Tomcat 8.0.9 introduced a fix where this is effectively done automatically for the `ERROR` dispatcher - see the answer in your linked question. But you're not using the container's error handling mechanism to render your error page, you're using Spring MVC to manually forward to the view, hence why you need to do this. Personally I encountered this issue under Jetty 9.2.7 where no such fix is in place, and I delegate error handling to the container, so I have `<dispatcher>ERROR</dispatcher>` configured in my filter mapping as well.

This all seems a bit arcane but is the only way I've discovered to successfully jump through this particular RESTful-Spring-JSP-web-application hoop.

Problem

Original source

Related problems

• HTTP Status 405 - JSPs only permit GET POST or HEAD