Consider deprecating @ControllerEndpoint and @RestControllerEndpoint

We should decide if we want to deprecate and later remove @ControllerEndpoint and @RestControllerEndpoint from the actuator. Using them ties the user to WebMVC or WebFlux and they were meant to ease the upgrade path to the weblayer-abstracting @Endpoint with @ReadOperation, etc.

Getting rid of those would pave the way for https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/20290.

If you’re seeing this ticket and object to this idea, please comment, your feedback is very valuable. Please also explain your use case and why this use case can’t be solved with @Endpoint or @WebEndpoint.

[mmoayyed]

We have quite a few @RestControllerEndpoint annotations used here.

Main use cases that I think would be useful and helpful to support going forward would be:

• Support the convenience of @GetMapping, @PostMapping, @ResponseBody, etc.

I think most of these could likely be converted and written to conform to the new way of doing this.

• Ability to read the servlet request body in raw form without mapping the request body it to an object, using HttpServletRequest#getInputStream()

It might be doable to do this today, but I wasn’t able to find an alternative.

[mmoayyed]

One other thing that might be useful here: @RestControllerEndpoint allows for overloading methods that address different requirements. For example, one could have multiple @GetMapping methods that handle different concerns, with different parameters or path variables. This seems more natural vs one @ReadOperation with 2-3 parameters some marked as selectors and some marked as not. Perhaps the replacement could provide the same programming model.