Sending form data using JSON and AJAX in Spring

Question

I am trying to submit form to Spring controller using AJAX call. Despite trying different options, I always get 400 Bad Request "The request sent by the client was syntactically incorrect." response. This is the JavaScript code that I use to send data:

$('#addNewTransactionForm').submit(function(event) {
  var transaction = new Object();
  transaction.date = $('#date').val();
  transaction.value = $('#value').val();
  transaction.categoryID = $('#categoryID').val();
  transaction.accountToID = $('#accountTo').val();
  transaction.accountFromID = $('#accountFrom').val();
  transaction.description = $('#description').val();

  $.ajax({
    url: "${pageContext.request.contextPath}/transactions/create.json",
    data: JSON.stringify(transaction),
    type: "POST",
    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",

    beforeSend: function(xhr) {
      xhr.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json");
      xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json");
    }
  });

  event.preventDefault();
});

This is the Spring controller method:

@RequestMapping(value = "/create", method = RequestMethod.POST,
    produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE, consumes = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
public @ResponseBody TransactionFO createTransaction(@RequestBody @Valid TransactionFO transaction, final Principal principal) {
  logger.info("createTransaction");
  String name = principal.getName();
  return transactionService.addNewTransaction(transaction, name);
}

This is the bean code:

public class TransactionFO {

  private Date date;

  @Digits(integer=8, fraction=4)
  private BigDecimal value;

  @NotNull
  private Integer categoryID;

  private Integer accountToID;
  private Integer accountFromID;

  @Length(min=0, max=255)
  private String description;

  // getters and setters
}

I am confused because I followed this tutorial and the code appears to be identical to me. I have following Jackson configuration in my .xml Spring configuration file:

<beans:bean id="jacksonMessageConverter" class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter"></beans:bean>
<beans:bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter">
    <beans:property name="messageConverters">
        <beans:list>
            <beans:ref bean="jacksonMessageConverter" />
        </beans:list>
    </beans:property>
</beans:bean>

I have noticed that if I change TransactionFO type to String, the request passes correctly. However, this is not a desired behavior, in this case I will be forced to parse JSON string manually. Any help will be hugely appreciated, I lost 2 days already on this issue.

Data from Chrome console:

Request URL:http://localhost:8080/finager/transactions/create.json
Request Method:POST
Status Code:400 Bad Request
Request Headersview source
Accept:application/json
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:pl-PL,pl;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Length:127
Content-Type:application/json
Cookie:JSESSIONID=31B00AA068448DB235C26F023F60A0BD
DNT:1
Host:localhost:8080
Origin:http://localhost:8080
Referer:http://localhost:8080/finager/transactions
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)Chrome/32.0.1700.77 Safari/537.36
X-Requested-With:XMLHttpRequest
Request Payloadview source
{date:Sun Feb 02 17:22:29 CET 2014, value:0, categoryID:100, accountToID:35,accountFromID:null,…}
accountFromID: null
accountToID: "35"
categoryID: "100"
date: "Sun Feb 02 17:22:29 CET 2014"
description: ""
value: "0"

Thank you very much in advance.

PS. What is the proper way to send validation info to user via AJAX in order to avoid reloading the page? I have to perform complicated validation that could not be handled by the Hibernate Validator annotations.

You should look at this post: stackoverflow.com/questions/10323957/posting-json-to-rest-api/… to see how to enable trace logging. I suspect Jackson isn't liking your JSON, and this will show you why. — Rob Elsner
– Rob Elsner, Commented Feb 2, 2014 at 16:39
if there are any stracktraces in the server, can you post them here, and if too long in pastebin.com? — Angular University
– Angular University, Commented Feb 2, 2014 at 16:45
No stack trace related to the issue, that is the main problem. ;) I have the same suspicion as Rob and now I am trying to and SFL4J and Logback and to display the error. Thanks Rob for the hint. — mc.suchecki
– mc.suchecki, Commented Feb 2, 2014 at 17:05

Ilya · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-04 14:24:53Z

1

It seems to me that you are sending a date with incorrect format. Try to send the request with

transaction.date = '2014-02-02';

One more tip. Try to load sources of springframework (if you are using maven run mvn dependency:sources) and put breakpoint in MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter#readInternal. This method is called for parsing json.

answered Feb 4, 2014 at 14:24

Ilya

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Angular University · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-02 16:33:13Z

0

Do you have all the needed Jackson jars in the classpath? For example for Jackson 2.1, the following artifacts are needed:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
    <version>${jackson.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
    <version>${jackson.version}</version>
</dependency>

The exact list of artifacts might be different according to the Jackson version.

answered Feb 2, 2014 at 16:33

Angular University

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1 Comment

mc.suchecki Over a year ago

Thanks, but it appears that Jackson was imported correctly.

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