How do I return a 403 Forbidden in Spring MVC?

Quickie

If you are using plain JSP views (as is most common), then simply add

<% response.setStatus( 403 ); %>

somewhere in your view file. At the top is a nice place.

Detail

In MVC, i would always set this in the view, and in most cases with Spring-MVC, use the SimpleMappingExceptionResolver to present the correct view in response to a thrown runtime Exception.

For example: create and throw a PermissionDeniedException in your controller or service layer and have the exception resolver point to a view file permissionDenied.jsp. This view file sets the 403 status and shows the user an appropriate message.

In your Spring bean XML file:

<bean id="exceptionResolver"
      class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleMappingExceptionResolver">
  <property name="exceptionMappings">
    <props>
      <prop key="PermissionDeniedException">          
        rescues/permissionDenied
      </prop>
      ... set other exception/view mappings as <prop>s here ...
    </props>
  </property>
  <property name="defaultErrorView" value="rescues/general" />
</bean>

<bean id="viewResolver"
      class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
  <property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView" />
  <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/" />
  <property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
</bean>

If you need to implement a user login mechanism, take a look at Spring Security (formerly Acegi Security).

You can also just throw

org.springframework.security.access.AccessDeniedException("403 returned");

This returns a 403 in the response header.

Create an Exception annotated with @ResponseStatus e.g. like this:

@ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.FORBIDDEN)
public class ForbiddenException extends RuntimeException {
}

Now just throw that Exception in your handler method and the response will have status 403.