I had a similar problem. The items I'm returning are large and I wanted to write them out over stream. So, my software looked like this:
post("/apiserver", "application/json", (request, response) -> {
log.info("Received request from " + request.raw().getRemoteAddr());
ServerHandler handler = new ServerHandler();
return handler.handleRequest(request, response);
});
In my handler, I got the raw HttpResponse object, opened its OutputStream and wrote over it like so:
ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
mapper.writeValue(response.raw().getOutputStream(), records);
Since I knew I had written over the OutputStream what the caller had asked for at that point (or an error), I figured I could just return null. My program worked fine. Spark would route the request to my handler as expected. And, since I was writing over the raw OutputStream, I was getting back what was expected on the client side. But, I kept seeing the message '/apiserver route not defined' in my server logs.
In looking at the Spark documentation, it says:
The main building block of a Spark application is a set of routes. A route is made up of three simple pieces:
A verb (get, post, put, delete, head, trace, connect, options)
A path (/hello, /users/:name)
A callback (request, response) -> { }
Obviously Spark does not know what you wrote over the raw HttpResponse and as a web-server, you should be providing some response to callers. So, if your response is null, you haven't fulfilled the requirements of providing a callback and you get the error that there's no map found even if Spark behaved as expected otherwise. Just return a response (null is not a response, "200 OK" is) and the error will go away.
[Edit] Spelling and grammar.