Spring Boot - Is it possible to return a File OR xml from web service depending on success?

Question

I've been tasked to create a web service that fetches a file from an Azure storage account.

On sucess : return the file as the payload

On error : return an xml response.

The xml response will contain a copy of the request, error codes and messages etc as the user will need a helpful error message explaining what happened.

I can find instructions for how to return a single object/media type, but not multiple types dependent on condition.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Solved with an exception handler thanks to Abhijeet's comment - important to add the contentType or it returns JSON by default

@ControllerAdvice
public class MyExceptionHandler {

  @ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.I_AM_A_TEAPOT)
  @ExceptionHandler(MyException.class)
  @ResponseBody
  ResponseEntity<?> exceptionHandler(MyException e){
      InvoiceArchiveResponse responseObject = e.getResponseObject();
      return ResponseEntity.badRequest()
              .contentType(MediaType.parseMediaType("application/xml"))
              .body(responseObject);
  }
}

Thanks!