Who sets request content-type in Spring MVC

Question

I have read through the post " Who sets response content-type in Spring MVC (@ResponseBody) ", it helped me to resolve my problem of displaying UTF-8 (CJK characters) data at client side using JSON method.

Now find I have problem to post UTF-8 data to server side using JSON. The javascript method I am using:

function startSomething() {

    console.log("startSomething()");
    console.log("  getOriginName() = " + getOriginName());
    console.log("  getDestinationName() = " + getDestinationName());

    $.ajaxSetup({ scriptCharset: "utf-8" , 
                  contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8"});

    // send the data to server side
    $.ajax({
        url: "/mywebapp/something/start",
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        dataType: "json",
        data: {
            originName          : getOriginName(),
            destinationName     : getDestinationName()
        },
        success: function(response) {
            // do something
        }
    });
}

After triggering the javascript method, I can see the value printed out in browser console correctly, something as:

  getOriginName() = N Bridge Rd
  getDestinationName() = 夢幻之城@ Boat Quay

My server side code:

@RequestMapping("/something")
@Controller
public class TestController {

    // the logger
    private Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(TestController.class);

    @RequestMapping(value = "/start", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public ResponseEntity<String> start(@RequestParam String originName, 
                                        @RequestParam String destinationName,
                                        HttpServletRequest request, 
                                        HttpServletResponse response) {

        String characterEncoding = request.getCharacterEncoding();
        String contentType = request.getContentType();

        logger.debug("  characterEncoding = " + characterEncoding);
        logger.debug("  contentType = " + contentType);

        if (logger.isDebugEnabled()) {
            String logMessage = StringUtils.join(
                    new Object[]{
                            "  originName = ", originName,
                            "  destinationName = ", destinationName
                    }
            );
            logger.debug(logMessage);
        }

        ...
    }
}

The output from my server side code:

TestController -   characterEncoding = UTF-8
TestController -   contentType = application/json; charset=utf-8
TestController -   originName = N Bridge Rd  destinationName = 夢幻ä¹å@ Boat Quay

You can see that the request encoding is UTF-8, but the value from client side is wrongly encoded CJK character.

What can go wrong here? Please give me some hints, thank you. George

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with JSON & Spring and solved the issue by specifying URIEncoding="UTF-8" on <Connector> in my Tomcat server.xml config, as described here:

http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ/CharacterEncoding#Q8