Getting resource not found when try to return html page from controller

I am unable to render html page in springboot. Here is code…

@RestController
    public class ProductController {
        @Autowired
        ProductService service;
    
        @InitBinder
        public void initBinder(WebDataBinder webDataBinder) {
            SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy");
            dateFormat.setLenient(false);
            webDataBinder.registerCustomEditor(Date.class, new CustomDateEditor(dateFormat, true));
        }
        
        @RequestMapping(value = { "/", "/home" })
        public ModelAndView home() {
            System.out.println("sdasasas");
            return new ModelAndView("home");
        }
    
    

but whenever i hit http://localhost:8080/home it shows following logs

-8080-exec-4] o.s.w.s.v.ContentNegotiatingViewResolver : Selected 'text/html' given [text/html, application/xhtml+xml, image/webp, image/apng, application/signed-exchange;v=b3, application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8]
2019-07-31 16:05:25.354 DEBUG 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.s.w.servlet.view.InternalResourceView  : View name 'home', model {}
2019-07-31 16:05:25.354 DEBUG 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.s.w.servlet.view.InternalResourceView  : Forwarding to [/WEB-INF/html/home.html]
2019-07-31 16:05:25.354 DEBUG 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.s.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet        : "FORWARD" dispatch for GET "/WEB-INF/html/home.html", parameters={}
2019-07-31 16:05:25.356 DEBUG 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.s.w.s.handler.SimpleUrlHandlerMapping  : Mapped to ResourceHttpRequestHandler ["classpath:/META-INF/resources/", "classpath:/resources/", "classpath:/static/", "classpath:/public/","/"]
2019-07-31 16:05:25.356  WARN 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.s.w.s.r.ResourceHttpRequestHandler     : Path with "WEB-INF" or "META-INF": [WEB-INF/html/home.html]
2019-07-31 16:05:25.356 DEBUG 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.s.w.s.r.ResourceHttpRequestHandler     : Resource not found
2019-07-31 16:05:25.357 DEBUG 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.s.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet        : Exiting from "FORWARD" dispatch, status 404
2019-07-31 16:05:25.357 DEBUG 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.j.s.OpenEntityManagerInViewInterceptor : Closing JPA EntityManager in OpenEntityManagerInViewInterceptor
2019-07-31 16:05:25.357 DEBUG 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.s.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet        : Completed 404 NOT_FOUND
2019-07-31 16:05:25.357 DEBUG 14850 --- [nio-8080-exec-4] o.s.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet        : "ERROR" dispatch for GET "/error", parameters={}

Answer

Avoid @RestController for MVC Based Application which has to return a view. It is mainly used for REST APIs. While @Controller can return a view

More On @RestController:

• This annotation is a specialized version of @Controller which adds @Controller and @ResponseBody annotation automatically. so we do not have to add @ResponseBody to our mapping methods. That means @ResponseBody is default active.
• If you use @RestController you cannot return a view (By using Viewresolver in Spring/Spring-Boot)
• @RestController also converts the response to JSON/XML automatically as @ResponseBody makes the returned objects to something that could be in the body, e.g. JSON or XML

Controller vs RestController

---

@RestController
    public class ProductController {
        @Autowired
        ProductService service;

        @RequestMapping(value = { "/", "/home" })
        public @ResponseBody ModelAndView home() {
            System.out.println("sdasasas");
            ModelAndView modelAndView = new ModelAndView();
            modelAndView.setViewName("home");
            return modelAndView;
        }
}

Project Structure

No need to specify spring.mvc.view.prefix=/WEB-INF/html/ spring.mvc.view.suffix=.html

Also, make sure you don’t have any additional class with @EnableWebMvc annotation. This can mess up the spring-boot autoconfiguration.