2.5. Content Negotiation

The management framework defines Content Type to indicate the format of management requests and responses. Clients can dictate the content type of the management request by specifying the Accept and Content-Type headers of the HTTP request. The Accept header indicates the format of the response and the Content-Type header specifies the format of the request. Below is a list of request headers that map to the Content Type of the management system.
Header
Content Type
application/json
JSON
application/xml
XML
application/zip
ZIP

Note

JSON is the default content type.

2.5.1. Browser Content Negotiation

To make it easy to control the content type of management requests through the browser, the REST component supports the format HTTP parameter to dictate the format of the response. This is because most browsers already send an 'Accept' header.

Example 2.8. Specifying the response should be returned as XML

http://localhost:8080/rest/private/managed-components/foo/bar?format=xml

Below is the list of format HTTP parameters which map to Content Types.
Format parameter
Content Type
format=json (default)
JSON
format=xml
XML

Important

Content negotiation is ignored for content type specific operations such as read-config-as-xml and export-resource since these cannot return different formats.