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

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

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
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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:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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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.

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eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)
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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:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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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:

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eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Do JSON right with Jackson

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eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)
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Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

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Get Started with Apache Maven:

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eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)
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Building a REST API with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

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Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)
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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)
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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)
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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.

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Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
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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:

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Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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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)
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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (cat=Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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1. Overview

In this quick tutorial, we’re going to look at how to access HTTP Headers in a Spring Rest Controller.

First, we’ll be using the @RequestHeader annotation to read headers individually as well as all together.

After that, we’ll take a deeper look at the @RequestHeader attributes.

Further reading:

Spring RequestMapping

Spring @RequestMapping - Basic Example, @RequestParam, @PathVariable, Header mapping

How to Set a Header on a Response with Spring

Learn how to set a header on a specific response or on all response in Spring.

Using Spring ResponseEntity to Manipulate the HTTP Response

Learn how to manipulate the HTTP response using the ResponseEntity class.

2. Accessing HTTP Headers

2.1. Individually

If we need access to a specific header, we can configure @RequestHeader with the header name:

@GetMapping("/greeting")
public ResponseEntity<String> greeting(@RequestHeader(HttpHeaders.ACCEPT_LANGUAGE) String language) {
    // code that uses the language variable
    return new ResponseEntity<String>(greeting, HttpStatus.OK);
}

Then we can access the value using the variable passed into our method. If a header named accept-language isn’t found in the request, the method returns a “400 Bad Request” error.

Our headers don’t have to be strings. If we know our header is a number, we can declare our variable as a numeric type:

@GetMapping("/double")
public ResponseEntity<String> doubleNumber(@RequestHeader("my-number") int myNumber) {
    return new ResponseEntity<String>(String.format("%d * 2 = %d", 
      myNumber, (myNumber * 2)), HttpStatus.OK);
}

2.2. All at Once

If we’re not sure which headers will be present, or we need more of them than we want in our method’s signature, we can use the @RequestHeader annotation without a specific name.

We have a few choices for our variable type: a Map, a MultiValueMap, or a HttpHeaders object.

First, let’s get the request headers as a Map:

@GetMapping("/listHeaders")
public ResponseEntity<String> listAllHeaders(
  @RequestHeader Map<String, String> headers) {
    headers.forEach((key, value) -> {
        LOG.info(String.format("Header '%s' = %s", key, value));
    });

    return new ResponseEntity<String>(
      String.format("Listed %d headers", headers.size()), HttpStatus.OK);
}

If we use a Map and one of the headers has more than one value, we’ll get only the first value. This is the equivalent of using the getFirst method on a MultiValueMap.

If our headers may have multiple values, we can get them as a MultiValueMap:

@GetMapping("/multiValue")
public ResponseEntity<String> multiValue(
  @RequestHeader MultiValueMap<String, String> headers) {
    headers.forEach((key, value) -> {
        LOG.info(String.format(
          "Header '%s' = %s", key, value.stream().collect(Collectors.joining("|"))));
    });
        
    return new ResponseEntity<String>(
      String.format("Listed %d headers", headers.size()), HttpStatus.OK);
}

We can also get our headers as an HttpHeaders object:

@GetMapping("/getBaseUrl")
public ResponseEntity<String> getBaseUrl(@RequestHeader HttpHeaders headers) {
    InetSocketAddress host = headers.getHost();
    String url = "http://" + host.getHostName() + ":" + host.getPort();
    return new ResponseEntity<String>(String.format("Base URL = %s", url), HttpStatus.OK);
}

The HttpHeaders object has accessors for common application headers.

When we access a header by name from a Map, MultiValueMap or the HttpHeaders object, we’ll get a null if it isn’t present.

3. @RequestHeader Attributes

Now that we’ve gone over the basics of accessing request headers with the @RequestHeader annotation, let’s take a closer look at its attributes.

We’ve already used the name or value attributes implicitly when we’ve specifically named our header:

public ResponseEntity<String> greeting(@RequestHeader(HttpHeaders.ACCEPT_LANGUAGE) String language) {}

We can accomplish the same thing by using the name attribute:

public ResponseEntity<String> greeting(
  @RequestHeader(name = HttpHeaders.ACCEPT_LANGUAGE) String language) {}

Next, let’s use the value attribute exactly the same way:

public ResponseEntity<String> greeting(
  @RequestHeader(value = HttpHeaders.ACCEPT_LANGUAGE) String language) {}

When we name a header specifically, the header is required by default. If the header isn’t found in the request, the controller returns a 400 error.

Let’s use the required attribute to indicate that our header isn’t required:

@GetMapping("/nonRequiredHeader")
public ResponseEntity<String> evaluateNonRequiredHeader(
  @RequestHeader(value = "optional-header", required = false) String optionalHeader) {
    return new ResponseEntity<String>(String.format(
      "Was the optional header present? %s!",
        (optionalHeader == null ? "No" : "Yes")),HttpStatus.OK);
}

Since our variable will be null if the header isn’t present in the request, we need to be sure to do the appropriate null checking.

Let’s use the defaultValue attribute to provide a default value for our header:

@GetMapping("/default")
public ResponseEntity<String> evaluateDefaultHeaderValue(
  @RequestHeader(value = "optional-header", defaultValue = "3600") int optionalHeader) {
    return new ResponseEntity<String>(
      String.format("Optional Header is %d", optionalHeader), HttpStatus.OK);
}

4. Conclusion

In this short tutorial, we learned how to access request headers in Spring REST controllers.

First, we used the @RequestHeader annotation to supply request headers to our controller methods.

After checking out the basics, we took a detailed look at the attributes for the @RequestHeader annotation.

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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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

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

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Course – LS – NPI (cat=REST)
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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Partner – Microsoft – NPI (cat=Spring)
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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)