Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices

Content negotiation with HTTP headers

With our earlier example, we have seen that the server understands the content-types of incoming requests and entities with HTTP request header content-types.

In our code example, we have implemented the following content type and, by default application/JSON, and to represent what content type that the client desired to get, we use application/JSON as the Accept header.

Please note that if no Accept header is present in the request, the server will send a pre-configured default representation type. In our example, it is always application/JSON, as shown in the following screenshot:

The preceding screenshot ...