Spring: getOutputStream() has already been called for this response

I know that there are many other posts dealing with the very same error, but all of them are either about JSP / GSP pages or for any other reason not very helpful in my case. I'm using Spring MVC with Thymeleaf. The following function is for downloading a file.

@RequestMapping(value = "/test/download/*", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String getFile(HttpServletResponse response)
{

    ServletOutputStream stream = null;
    try
    {
        stream = response.getOutputStream();

        MultipartFile f = test.getFile();

        InputStream is = f.getInputStream();
        IOUtils.copy(is, stream);
        response.flushBuffer();

        stream.flush();
        stream.close();

    } catch(Exception ex)
    {

    }

    return "test";

}

It does actually work, so it's not too much of a problem, but in the console, I'm always getting the following error:

2014-01-10T09:28:09.053+0100  SEVERE  Servlet.service() for servlet [dispatcherServlet] in context with path [] threw exception  [Request processing failed; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: getOutputStream() has already been called for this response] with root cause
java.lang.IllegalStateException: getOutputStream() has already been called for this response
at org.apache.catalina.connector.Response.getWriter(Response.java:638)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade.getWriter(ResponseFacade.java:214)
at javax.servlet.ServletResponseWrapper.getWriter(ServletResponseWrapper.java:105)
at javax.servlet.ServletResponseWrapper.getWriter(ServletResponseWrapper.java:105)
at org.springframework.security.web.context.SaveContextOnUpdateOrErrorResponseWrapper.getWriter(SaveContextOnUpdateOrErrorResponseWrapper.java:125)
at org.thymeleaf.spring3.view.ThymeleafView.renderFragment(ThymeleafView.java:335)
at org.thymeleaf.spring3.view.ThymeleafView.render(ThymeleafView.java:190)
[...]

As far as I see, getOutputStream() is only called once. Also, the whole function is surrounded with a try-catch-block. So I'd like to know, where does this error come from?

If you return 'test', you are instructing your controller to send you to some view... after using the response outputStream to return a binary file. Here is an idea of how you should manage this:

Downloading a file from spring controllers