In Spring MVC, the registered HttpMessageConverter list is normally used at two places: RequestMappingHandlerAdapter (tutorial here) and HandlerExceptionResolvers (tutorial here).
In this quick example, we will see how to print list of all registered converters via an integration test.
Example
package com.logicbig.example;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.EnableWebMvc;
@EnableWebMvc
@Configuration
public class AppConfig {
}
Integration Test
package com.logicbig.example;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.http.converter.HttpMessageConverter;
import org.springframework.test.context.junit.jupiter.web.SpringJUnitWebConfig;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.method.annotation.RequestMappingHandlerAdapter;
import java.util.List;
import static org.junit.jupiter.api.Assertions.assertTrue;
@SpringJUnitWebConfig(AppConfig.class)
public class MessageConverterListTest {
@Autowired
private RequestMappingHandlerAdapter handlerAdapter;
@Test
public void messageConverterListTest() {
List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> converters =
handlerAdapter.getMessageConverters();
System.out.println("-- Converters --");
converters.stream()
.map(Object::getClass)
.map(Class::getSimpleName)
.forEach(x -> System.out.println(" -" + x));
assertTrue(!converters.isEmpty());
}
}
mvn clean test Output$ mvn clean test
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]
[INFO] -----------< com.logicbig.example:list-of-message-converter >-----------
[INFO] Building list-of-message-converter 1.0-SNAPSHOT
[INFO] from pom.xml
[INFO] --------------------------------[ war ]---------------------------------
[INFO]
[INFO] --- clean:3.2.0:clean (default-clean) @ list-of-message-converter ---
[INFO] Deleting D:\example-projects\spring-mvc\list-of-message-converter\target
[INFO]
[INFO] --- resources:3.3.1:resources (default-resources) @ list-of-message-converter ---
[WARNING] Using platform encoding (UTF-8 actually) to copy filtered resources, i.e. build is platform dependent!
[INFO] skip non existing resourceDirectory D:\example-projects\spring-mvc\list-of-message-converter\src\main\resources
[INFO]
[INFO] --- compiler:3.15.0:compile (default-compile) @ list-of-message-converter ---
[INFO] Recompiling the module because of changed source code.
[INFO] Compiling 1 source file with javac [debug target 25] to target\classes
[INFO]
[INFO] --- resources:3.3.1:testResources (default-testResources) @ list-of-message-converter ---
[WARNING] Using platform encoding (UTF-8 actually) to copy filtered resources, i.e. build is platform dependent!
[INFO] skip non existing resourceDirectory D:\example-projects\spring-mvc\list-of-message-converter\src\test\resources
[INFO]
[INFO] --- compiler:3.15.0:testCompile (default-testCompile) @ list-of-message-converter ---
[INFO] Recompiling the module because of changed dependency.
[INFO] Compiling 1 source file with javac [debug target 25] to target\test-classes
[INFO]
[INFO] --- surefire:3.2.5:test (default-test) @ list-of-message-converter ---
[INFO] Using auto detected provider org.apache.maven.surefire.junitplatform.JUnitPlatformProvider
[WARNING] file.encoding cannot be set as system property, use <argLine>-Dfile.encoding=...</argLine> instead
[INFO]
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] T E S T S
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Running com.logicbig.example.MessageConverterListTest
-- Converters --
-ByteArrayHttpMessageConverter
-StringHttpMessageConverter
-ResourceHttpMessageConverter
-ResourceRegionHttpMessageConverter
-AllEncompassingFormHttpMessageConverter
-JacksonJsonHttpMessageConverter
[INFO] Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.830 s -- in com.logicbig.example.MessageConverterListTest
[INFO]
[INFO] Results:
[INFO]
[INFO] Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0
[INFO]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 4.750 s
[INFO] Finished at: 2026-07-23T14:51:41+08:00
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
The list might be different from version to version, also there might be more converters depending on the dependencies on the classpath and other application level custom converters. The next tutorial shows how to register custom converters.
Example ProjectDependencies and Technologies Used: - spring-webmvc 7.0.6 (Spring Web MVC)
Version Compatibility: 3.2.9.RELEASE - 7.0.6 Version compatibilities of spring-webmvc with this example: Versions in green have been tested.
- spring-test 7.0.6 (Spring TestContext Framework)
- jakarta.servlet-api 6.1.0 (Jakarta Servlet API documentation)
- jackson-databind 3.0.0 (General data-binding functionality for Jackson: works on core streaming API)
- junit-jupiter-engine 6.0.3 (Module "junit-jupiter-engine" of JUnit)
- JDK 25
- Maven 3.9.11
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