Overview

After upgrading to Spring Framework 6.2, I encountered an issue where request headers such as priority are automatically bound to the parameters in my controller. This behavior wasn't present in earlier versions (e.g., 6.1). My intention is to treat missing parameters (like priority) as default values (e.g., 0), but now the framework seems to bind unexpected header values like priority: u=1, i, which leads to unexpected behavior.

I would like to know if there’s a way to disable automatic header binding or configure Spring to ignore specific headers like priority when processing requests.

  • spring framework version: 6.2.0
  • java version: java21

Example

public class HoldingAllocatorPo {
    private short priority;
    public short getPriority() {
        return priority;
    }
    public void setPriority(short priority) {
        this.priority = priority;
    }
        ....

public class ShortConverter implements org.springframework.core.convert.converter.Converter<String, Short> {
     @Override
     public Short convert(String source) {
         return source == null || source.length() == 0 ? 0 : Short.valueOf(source);
     }
 }

When we register this ShortConverter and submit a form request like this: type=1&status=1&companyId=1&name=tt&abbreviation=tt&tradeTypes=7&sides=3&orderTypes=85 Our intention is that when priority is not set, it should be treated as 0. This worked correctly in Spring Framework versions prior to 6.2. However, after upgrading to 6.2, it no longer works as expected.

For example, in Chrome, the complete request looks like this:

curl 'https://xxx.xxx.xx/rest/holding/allocator/validate' \
  -H 'accept: application/json, text/plain, */*' \
  -H 'accept-language: zh-CN,zh;q=0.9,en;q=0.8' \
  -H 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  -H 'cookie: lang=1; _ga_0C4M1PWYZ7=GS1.1.1701684974.1.1.1701685076.0.0.0; _ga_K2SPJK2C73=GS1.1.1701684974.1.1.1701685076.59.0.0; _ga_T11SF3WXX2=GS1.1.1701684974.1.1.1701685076.59.0.0; _yjsu_yjad=1704697517.59e4b353-f159-4b04-aae9-2abff30d463b; _uetvid=47cc51e0adf411eeafdf4df33d978593; _ga_975G4RTB2H=GS1.1.1725435510.1.0.1725435669.60.0.0; _ga=GA1.2.2093050243.1701684974; JSESSIONID.admin=admin9@2OFM5mJyDln.1qFXXfVSXUs.azV0fNQr0Qh' \
  -H 'origin: https://xxx.xxx.xx' \
  -H 'priority: u=1, i' \
  -H 'referer: https://xxx.xxx.xx/' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua: "Google Chrome";v="131", "Chromium";v="131", "Not_A Brand";v="24"' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "Windows"' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-dest: empty' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-origin' \
  -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' \
  -H 'x-browser: Chrome 131.0.6778.87' \
  -H 'x-platform: Windows 15.0.0' \
  -H 'x-version: 6fb5f6eb' \
  --data-raw 'type=1&status=1&companyId=1&name=tt&abbreviation=tt&tradeTypes=7&sides=3&orderTypes=85'

In this request, the priority header is present but contains unexpected values like u=1, i. After the upgrade, this causes issues with handling the request in Spring Framework 6.2.

related issue 32676

Question

Is there a way to prevent binding request headers in Spring Framework?

Comment From: quaff

Duplicate of #33961

Comment From: rstoyanchev

Thanks for the report.

There is a way, but it is not very convenient. Headers and path vars are added from ExtendedServletRequestDataBinder#addBindValues, which is a protected method. To plug that subclass you need to override RequestMappingHandlerAdapter#createDataBinderFactory. In Spring Boot, WebMvcStrategies lets you provide an extension of RequestMappingHandlerAdapter.

To make this easier, we can add a Predicate on ExtendedServletRequestDataBinder, and you could then customize that locally on a controller, or globally through a controller advice class:

@ControllerAdvice
public class MyControllerAdvice {

    @InitBinder
    public void initBinder(ExtendedServletRequestDataBinder binder) {

        binder.addHeaderPredicate(header -> ... );
    }
}

The "Priority" header seems to be RFC-defined and common to both this and the report in #33961. We can exclude it by default as it is likely to cause more surprise.

Comment From: leonchen83

@rstoyanchev We aim to customize a global header filtering strategy by extending RequestMappingHandlerAdapter#createDataBinderFactory. To achieve this, we implemented a custom extension class XRequestMappingHandlerAdapter. 

public class XRequestMappingHandlerAdapter extends RequestMappingHandlerAdapter {

    private Set<String> headers = new HashSet<>();

    public void setHeaders (Set<String> headers) {
        this.headers = headers;
    }

    @Override
    protected InitBinderDataBinderFactory createDataBinderFactory (List<InvocableHandlerMethod> a) {
        return new XServletRequestDataBinderFactory (a , getWebBindingInitializer() , this.headers);
    }

    public static final class XServletRequestDataBinderFactory extends InitBinderDataBinderFactory {

        private final Set<String> headers;

        public XServletRequestDataBinderFactory (List<InvocableHandlerMethod> a, WebBindingInitializer b, Set<String> c) {
            super(a, b); this.headers = c;
        }

        @Override
        protected ServletRequestDataBinder createBinderInstance(Object a, String b, NativeWebRequest c) throws Exception {
            var r = new ExtendedServletRequestDataBinder(a , b); r.setHeaderPredicate(h -> headers.contains(h)); return r;
        }
    }
}

However, we encountered issues when attempting to register this class.

We are using traditional Spring MVC XML configuration to manage dependencies. for example

    <mvc:annotation-driven conversion-service="web.admin.conversion.service">

        <mvc:argument-resolvers>
            <bean class="xx.xx.XXArgumentResolver"/>

        </mvc:argument-resolvers>

        <mvc:path-matching suffix-pattern = "false" path-matcher = "web.admin.path.matcher"/>

        <mvc:message-converters>
            <bean class="xx.glossary.spring.converter.OctetHttpMessageConverter">
            </bean>
            <bean class="xx.glossary.spring.converter.JsonHttpMessageConverter" >
                <property name="marshaller" ref="web.admin.json.marshaller" />
            </bean>
        </mvc:message-converters>

        <mvc:async-support default-timeout="90000" task-executor="web.admin.async.executor">
            <mvc:callable-interceptors>
                <bean id="web.admin.async.aspect" class="xx.aspect.AsyncInterceptor"/>
            </mvc:callable-interceptors>
        </mvc:async-support>
    </mvc:annotation-driven>

Is there a simple way to register XRequestMappingHandlerAdapter in the XML configuration?

Comment From: bclozel

@leonchen83 unfortunately no, there is no way to register a custom RequestMappingHandlerAdapter bean with the XML mvc namespace. We don't intend to evolve this configuration variant and it's going to be officially deprecated in the next major version with #34063