Spring Boot Java Header Content-Type Constants

HTTP header Content-Type is used to specify the MIME type of the data being sent. It is an important header as it helps the receiver understand how to process the data. In Java, we can use the Spring Boot framework to specify the Content-Type header through constants.

Content-Type Constants in Spring Boot

The following are some commonly used Content-Type constants in Spring Boot:

• APPLICATION_ATOM_XML - Used for Atom feeds
• APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED - Used for form data submitted through HTML forms
• APPLICATION_JSON - Used for JSON data
• APPLICATION_OCTET_STREAM - Used for arbitrary binary data
• APPLICATION_PDF - Used for PDF documents
• APPLICATION_RSS_XML - Used for RSS feeds
• APPLICATION_XHTML_XML - Used for XHTML documents
• APPLICATION_XML - Used for XML data
• IMAGE_GIF - Used for GIF images
• IMAGE_JPEG - Used for JPEG images
• IMAGE_PNG - Used for PNG images
• MULTIPART_FORM_DATA - Used for form data submitted as multi-part MIME data
• TEXT_HTML - Used for HTML documents
• TEXT_PLAIN - Used for plain text documents
• TEXT_XML - Used for XML documents

How to Use Content-Type Constants

You can use the Content-Type constants in Spring Boot by importing the MediaType class from the org.springframework.http package. Here is an example:

import org.springframework.http.MediaType;

@RestController
public class MyController {
   
   @GetMapping(value = "/my-data", produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
   public MyData getMyData() {
      // code to return MyData in JSON format
   }
}

In the above example, we have used MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE to specify that the endpoint /my-data returns data in JSON format.

Conclusion

In this article, we have looked at some common Content-Type constants in Spring Boot and how to use them. Using constants helps in writing clean and consistent code, and makes it easier to change the content type in the future.