Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
announcement - icon

Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
announcement - icon

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
announcement - icon

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)
announcement - icon

Let's get started with a Microservice Architecture with Spring Cloud:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
announcement - icon

Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.

Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:

Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
announcement - icon

Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)
announcement - icon

Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
announcement - icon

Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
announcement - icon

Do JSON right with Jackson

Download the E-book

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)
announcement - icon

Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

Download the E-book

eBook – Maven – NPI EA (cat = Maven)
announcement - icon

Get Started with Apache Maven:

Download the E-book

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
announcement - icon

Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

Explore the eBook

eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)
announcement - icon

Building a REST API with Spring?

Download the E-book

Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
announcement - icon

Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

>> LEARN SPRING
Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)
announcement - icon

Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

>> The New “REST With Spring Boot”

Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)
announcement - icon

Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.

I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

>> Learn Spring Security

Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)
announcement - icon

All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.

>> GET THE COURSE
Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
announcement - icon

Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
announcement - icon

End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
announcement - icon

Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (cat=Baeldung)
announcement - icon

Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

1. Introduction

Using Spring, we usually have many ways to achieve the same goal, including fine-tuning HTTP responses.

In this short tutorial, we’ll see how to set the body, status, and headers of an HTTP response using ResponseEntity.

Further reading:

Getting and Verifying Response Data with REST-assured

Have a look at how to use REST-assured to validate and extract the response from a REST endpoint

Using Spring @ResponseStatus to Set HTTP Status Code

Have a look at the @ResponseStatus annotation and how to use it to set the response status code.

2. ResponseEntity

ResponseEntity represents the whole HTTP response: status code, headers, and body. As a result, we can use it to fully configure the HTTP response.

If we want to use it, we have to return it from the endpoint; Spring takes care of the rest.

ResponseEntity is a generic type. Consequently, we can use any type as the response body:

@GetMapping("/hello")
ResponseEntity<String> hello() {
    return new ResponseEntity<>("Hello World!", HttpStatus.OK);
}

Since we specify the response status programmatically, we can return with different status codes for different scenarios:

@GetMapping("/age")
ResponseEntity<String> age(
  @RequestParam("yearOfBirth") int yearOfBirth) {
 
    if (isInFuture(yearOfBirth)) {
        return new ResponseEntity<>(
          "Year of birth cannot be in the future", 
          HttpStatus.BAD_REQUEST);
    }

    return new ResponseEntity<>(
      "Your age is " + calculateAge(yearOfBirth), 
      HttpStatus.OK);
}

Additionally, we can set HTTP headers:

@GetMapping("/customHeader")
ResponseEntity<String> customHeader() {
    HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
    headers.add("Custom-Header", "foo");
        
    return new ResponseEntity<>(
      "Custom header set", headers, HttpStatus.OK);
}

Furthermore, ResponseEntity provides two nested builder interfaces: HeadersBuilder and its subinterface, BodyBuilder. Therefore, we can access their capabilities through the static methods of ResponseEntity.

The simplest case is a response with a body and HTTP 200 response code:

@GetMapping("/hello")
ResponseEntity<String> hello() {
    return ResponseEntity.ok("Hello World!");
}

For the most popular HTTP status codes we get static methods:

BodyBuilder accepted();
BodyBuilder badRequest();
BodyBuilder created(java.net.URI location);
HeadersBuilder<?> noContent();
HeadersBuilder<?> notFound();
BodyBuilder ok();

In addition, we can use the BodyBuilder status(HttpStatus status) and the BodyBuilder status(int status) methods to set any HTTP status.

Finally, with ResponseEntity<T> BodyBuilder.body(T body) we can set the HTTP response body:

@GetMapping("/age")
ResponseEntity<String> age(@RequestParam("yearOfBirth") int yearOfBirth) {
    if (isInFuture(yearOfBirth)) {
        return ResponseEntity.badRequest()
            .body("Year of birth cannot be in the future");
    }

    return ResponseEntity.status(HttpStatus.OK)
        .body("Your age is " + calculateAge(yearOfBirth));
}

We can also set custom headers:

@GetMapping("/customHeader")
ResponseEntity<String> customHeader() {
    return ResponseEntity.ok()
        .header("Custom-Header", "foo")
        .body("Custom header set");
}

Since BodyBuilder.body() returns a ResponseEntity instead of BodyBuilder, it should be the last call.

Note that with HeaderBuilder we can’t set any properties of the response body.

While returning ResponseEntity<T> object from the controller, we might get an exception or error while processing the request and would like to return error-related information to the user represented as some other type, let’s say E.

Spring 3.2 brings support for a global @ExceptionHandler with the new @ControllerAdvice annotation, which handles these kinds of scenarios. For in-depth details, refer to our existing article here.

While ResponseEntity is very powerful, we shouldn’t overuse it. In simple cases, there are other options that satisfy our needs and they result in much cleaner code.

3. Alternatives

3.1. @ResponseBody

In classic Spring MVC applications, endpoints usually return rendered HTML pages. Sometimes we only need to return the actual data; for example, when we use the endpoint with AJAX.

In such cases, we can mark the request handler method with @ResponseBody, and Spring treats the result value of the method as the HTTP response body itself.

For more information, this article is a good place to start.

3.2. @ResponseStatus

When an endpoint returns successfully, Spring provides an HTTP 200 (OK) response. If the endpoint throws an exception, Spring looks for an exception handler that tells which HTTP status to use.

We can mark these methods with @ResponseStatus, and therefore, Spring returns with a custom HTTP status.

For more examples, please visit our article about custom status codes.

3.3. Manipulate the Response Directly

Spring also lets us access the jakarta.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse object directly; we only have to declare it as a method argument:

@GetMapping("/manual")
void manual(HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException {
    response.setHeader("Custom-Header", "foo");
    response.setStatus(200);
    response.getWriter().println("Hello World!");
}

Since Spring provides abstractions and additional capabilities above the underlying implementation, we shouldn’t manipulate the response this way.

4. Conclusion

In this article, we discussed multiple ways to manipulate the HTTP response in Spring, and examined their benefits and drawbacks.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
announcement - icon

Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
announcement - icon

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
announcement - icon

The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
announcement - icon

Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
announcement - icon

Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
announcement - icon

Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

Explore the eBook

Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

announcement - icon

Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
announcement - icon

Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (All)
announcement - icon

Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – LS – NPI (cat=REST)
announcement - icon

Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Partner – Microsoft – NPI (cat=Spring)
announcement - icon

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)