How to access plain json body in Spring rest controller?

You can just use

@RequestBody String pBody

Best way I found until now is:

@RequestMapping(value = "/greeting", method = POST, consumes = APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE, produces = APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
@ResponseBody
public String greetingJson(HttpEntity<String> httpEntity) {
    String json = httpEntity.getBody();
    // json contains the plain json string

Let me know if there are other alternatives.

Only HttpServletRequest worked for me. HttpEntity gave null string.

import java.io.IOException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils;

@RequestMapping(value = "/greeting", method = POST, consumes = APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE, produces = APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
@ResponseBody
public String greetingJson(HttpServletRequest request) throws IOException {
    final String json = IOUtils.toString(request.getInputStream(), StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
    System.out.println("json = " + json);
    return "Hello World!";
}

simplest way that works for me is

@RequestMapping(value = "/greeting", method = POST, consumes = MediaType.ALL_VALUE, produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_UTF8_VALUE)
@ResponseBody
public String greetingJson(String raw) {
    System.out.println("json = " + raw);
    return "OK";
}