XML : How can I default my spring boot application to application/xml without killing /health?

I'm working on a spring-boot (1.4.0-RELEASE) MVC Groovy app which will present an XML api. By default Spring seems to wire up Jackson which marshalls my response objects to JSON, however I want it to default to responding in XML without requiring any Accept header from clients, hence I configured the default content type as follows:

  @Configuration  class SpringWebMvcConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {      @Override    public void configureContentNegotiation(ContentNegotiationConfigurer configurer) {      configurer.defaultContentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_XML);    }  }    

This works just fine, however when running our tests I discovered that calling /health now returns a 406 status code and no content (it previously returned a 200 and a JSON response).

Having reverted the above change I thought perhaps I could force each controller to explicitly set the response content type via the use of a ResponseEntity, in doing so I tried the following in my controller method:

  @RequestMapping(value = "/blah",                  method = RequestMethod.GET)  ResponseEntity<MyResponseObject> getProgrammeRestrictions(@PathVariable String coreNumber) {    // Generate response object (code snipped)...    new ResponseEntity<MyResponseObject>(myResponseObject,                                         new HttpHeaders(contentType: MediaType.APPLICATION_XML),                                         HttpStatus.OK)  }    

However this doesn't seem to influence the response type, which still defaults to JSON.

In a nutshell it seems that setting a default non-json content type breaks the actuator healthcheck. Is there someway to force the healthcheck bits and bobs to disregard the default setting and always be generated in JSON?

Has anyone else experienced this? Grateful for any pointers as I'm a bit stuck here.

Many thanks,

Edd