Spring RestTemplate Behavior when handling responses with a status of NO_CONTENT

One more way to solve this would be to make response entity as null as shown below.

  ResponseEntity<?> response = restTemplate.exchange("http://localhost:8080/myapp/user/{userID}",
                                                             HttpMethod.DELETE, 
                                                             requestEntity,
                                                             null,
                                                             userID);

If you still need response headers, try implementing the ResponseErrorHandler.

Here's a simple solution where you can set the default Content-Type for use if it is missing in the response. The Content-Type is added to the response header before it is handed back off to the preconfigured ResponseExtractor for extraction.

public class CustomRestTemplate extends RestTemplate {

    private MediaType defaultResponseContentType;

    public CustomRestTemplate() {
        super();
    }

    public CustomRestTemplate(ClientHttpRequestFactory requestFactory) {
        super(requestFactory);
    }

    public void setDefaultResponseContentType(String defaultResponseContentType) {
        this.defaultResponseContentType = MediaType.parseMediaType(defaultResponseContentType);
    }

    @Override
    protected <T> T doExecute(URI url, HttpMethod method, RequestCallback requestCallback, final ResponseExtractor<T> responseExtractor)
            throws RestClientException {

        return super.doExecute(url, method, requestCallback, new ResponseExtractor<T>() {
            public T extractData(ClientHttpResponse response) throws IOException {
                if (response.getHeaders().getContentType() == null && defaultResponseContentType != null) {
                    response.getHeaders().setContentType(defaultResponseContentType);
                }

                return responseExtractor.extractData(response);
            }
        });
    }
}

I believe you should probably look at the ResponseExtractor interface & call execute on the RestTemplate providing your implementation of the extractor. To me it looks like a common requirement to do this so have logged this:

https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-8016

Here's one I prepared earlier:

private class MyResponseExtractor extends HttpMessageConverterExtractor<MyEntity> {

    public MyResponseExtractor (Class<MyEntity> responseType,
      List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> messageConverters) {
        super(responseType, messageConverters);
    }

    @Override
    public MyEntity extractData(ClientHttpResponse response) throws IOException {

        MyEntity result;

        if (response.getStatusCode() == HttpStatus.OK) {
            result = super.extractData(response);
        } else {
            result = null;
        }

        return result;
    }
}

I've tested this & it seems to do what I want.

To create the instance of the ResponseExtractor I call the constructor & pass the converters from a RestTemplate instance that's been injected;

E.g.

ResponseExtractor<MyEntity> responseExtractor =
    new MyResponseExtractor(MyEntity.class, restTemplate.getMessageConverters());

Then the call is:

MyEntity responseAsEntity =
    restTemplate.execute(urlToCall, HttpMethod.GET, null, responseExtractor);

Your mileage may vary. ;-)