This is old, but the issue had tormented me for years and I just recently solved it so wanted to put here for others to stumble upon. The solution is to definitely use a filter as referenced in the first comment by @erichelgeson with this How can I read request body multiple times in Spring 'HandlerMethodArgumentResolver'?

It doesn't break data binding in the controller actions.

In my case though, I needed to change the body in the request before the action so I tweaked the MultipleReadHttpRequestWrapper to this https://gist.github.com/daptordarattler/81721a3ec77a05f58b7918dee5c206b9

Here is the sample project I created with a controller test case to confirm the data binding before I used it https://github.com/daptordarattler/demo-request-binding