Coerce @ResponseBody CharSequences to strings [SPR-13423]

[spring-projects-issues]

Christopher Smith opened SPR-13423 and commented

In the vein of #17756, but possibly more controversial, I suggest that any CharSequence returned from an @ReponseBody method be coerced to a text string. I believe that in the cases I can think of (returning a StringBuilder or GString), the intent is probably to return the text contents rather than a JSON/XML representation of the its internal structure.

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Affects: 4.2 GA

Issue Links:

• Allow MVC handler methods to return any CharSequence type as view name [SPR-13165] #17756 Allow MVC handler methods to return any CharSequence type as view name

Referenced from: commits 1291d6e

[spring-projects-issues]

Rossen Stoyanchev commented

Jackson seems to handle CharSequence so it's mostly about changing the StringHttpMessageConverter to deal with CharSequence. By the way there is also the ObjectToStringHttpMessageConverter which can convert any Object through a ConversionService before delegating to StringHttpMessageConverter.

[spring-projects-issues]

Rossen Stoyanchev commented

Actually never mind about changing StringHttpMessageConverter which is parameterized by String on the read and write side.