Building a RESTful Web Service with Spring

Overriding the HTTP method

In certain situations (for example, when the service or its consumers are behind an overzealous corporate firewall, or if the main consumer is a web page), only the GET and POST HTTP methods might be available. In such a case, it is possible to emulate the missing verbs by passing a custom header in the requests.

For example, resource updates can be handled using POST requests by setting a custom header (for example, X-HTTP-Method-Override) to PUT to indicate we are emulating a PUT request via a POST request. The following method will handle this scenario:

@RequestMapping(value = "/{roomId}", method = RequestMethod.POST, headers = {"X-HTTP-Method-Override=PUT"}) public ApiResponse updateRoomAsPost(@PathVariable("roomId") ...