Dependency issue after adding spring-data-rest to gs-rest-service sample project

Question

I'm experimenting RESTful Web Services with Spring, my starting project is Spring's gs-rest-service . The project works fine, when I hit http://localhost:8080/greeting I get {"id":1,"content":"Hello, World!"}.

The problem is when I added dependencies to spring-data-rest-core and spring-data-rest-webmvc in my pom.xml the application does not work any more. When I hit http://localhost:8080/greeting I get the following error:

Whitelabel Error Page
This application has no explicit mapping for /error, so you are seeing this as a fallback.
Tue Aug 12 12:27:28 CEST 2014
There was an unexpected error (type=Not Acceptable, status=406).
Could not find acceptable representation

When I remove the depndencies the application works fine again, what is causing this problem? Here is my pom.xml :

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>gs-rest-service</artifactId>
<version>0.1.0</version>
<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.5.RELEASE</version>
</parent>

<packaging>war</packaging>

<properties>
    <spring.version>4.0.5.RELEASE</spring.version>
    <spring.boot.version>1.1.4.RELEASE</spring.boot.version>
    <jdk.version>1.7</jdk.version>
    <jetty.version>8.1.8.v20121106</jetty.version>
    <spring.data.rest.version>2.1.2.RELEASE</spring.data.rest.version>
</properties>

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        <version>${spring.boot.version}</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-data-rest-core</artifactId>
        <version>${spring.data.rest.version}</version>
    </dependency>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-data-rest-webmvc</artifactId>
        <version>${spring.data.rest.version}</version>
    </dependency>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>junit</groupId>
        <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
        <version>3.8.1</version>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

<build>

    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>3.0</version>
            <configuration>
                <source>${jdk.version}</source>
                <target>${jdk.version}</target>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>

        <plugin>                
            <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>                
            <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>             
            <version>${jetty.version}</version>             
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>
</project>

Answer 1

Spring Boot ships a dedicated starter for Spring Data REST:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-rest</artifactId>
</dependency>

Answer 2

You are making things to complex in your dependencies and your configuration. As @OliverGierke already mentioned use the following starter instead of individual dependencies.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-rest</artifactId>
</dependency>

Also you are already using the spring-boot-starter-parent so yuo don't need spring boot versions are some of the additional properties you configured. Instead of jdk.version use java.version and that is all. Leaving you with the following pom. (Which also adds the spring-boot plugin).

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>gs-rest-service</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.0</version>

    <parent>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
        <version>1.1.5.RELEASE</version>
    </parent>

    <packaging>jar</packaging>

    <properties>
        <java.version>1.7</java.version>
    </properties>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-rest</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

This wil create an executable jar which you can run with java -jar <your-jar-name-here>.jar . This should also have all the dependencies you need including jackson for your JSON (un)marshalling, this is a dependency of spring-boot-starter-web .

Spring Boot with @EnableAutoConfiguration will detect Spring MVC and Jackson and do the proper configuration for it. The same for Spring Data REST. YOu shouldn't need to mess around with xml (or a war archive) yourself.

I removed Jetty if you want to use it check the Spring Boot reference guide on how to do this.

Answer 3

It turns out that I have to add dependencies to Jackson:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.jackson</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-core-asl</artifactId>
    <version>1.9.13</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.jackson</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-mapper-asl</artifactId>
    <version>1.9.13</version>
</dependency>

And declare a the following beans as described here Spring MVC - HttpMediaTypeNotAcceptableException :

<context:annotation-config/>

<bean id="jacksonMessageConverter" class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter">
</bean>
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter">
    <property name="messageConverters">
        <list>
            <ref bean="jacksonMessageConverter"/>
        </list>
    </property>
</bean>

Then, add the beans.xml to the Application.java with @ImportResource("beans.xml") .