Spring RestTemplate does not capture response body when error code 40x is returned

When consuming REST web services using SpringTemplate default configuration, when the response returns error HTTP status code, SpringTemplate will throw HttpClientErrorException . But you can still get the response body by calling:

clientEx.getResponseBodyAsByteArray();

OR

clientEx.getResponseBodyAsString();

But there is one special case, when error code is 40x, it fails to capture the response body.

Reason is described in ticket SPR-9999

While solution is quite simple as some one mentioned in the ticket. Use the "org.springframework.http.client.HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory" instead of the default one.

So the configuration should be:

<bean id="clientHttpRequestFactory" class="org.springframework.http.client.HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory"/>
    
<bean id="restTemplate" class="org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate">
     <property name="requestFactory" ref="clientHttpRequestFactory"/>
</bean>