Spring RestTemplate Behavior when handling responses with a status of NO_CONTENT

Okay, I have a class NamedSystems, that has as its only field a Set of NamedSystem.

I have a method to find NamedSystems by certain criteria. That's not really important. When it gets results, everything works fine. However, when it can't find anything, and thus returns a null (or empty -- I've tried both ways) set, I get problems. Let me explain.

I'm using the Spring RestTemplate class and I'm making a call like this in a unit test:

ResponseEntity<?> responseEntity = template.exchange(BASE_SERVICE_URL + "?
  alias={aliasValue}&aliasAuthority={aliasAssigningAuthority}", 
  HttpMethod.GET, makeHttpEntity("xml"), NamedSystems.class, 
  alias1.getAlias(), alias1.getAuthority());

Now, since this would normally return a 200, but I want to return a 204, I have an interceptor in my service that determines if a ModelAndView is a NamedSystem and if its set is null. If so, I then the set the status code to NO_CONTENT (204).

When I run my junit test, I get this error:

org.springframework.web.client.RestClientException: Cannot extract response: no Content-Type found

Setting the status to NO_CONTENT seems to wipe the content-type field (which does make sense when I think about it). So why is it even looking at it?

Spring's HttpMessageConverterExtractor extractData method:

public T extractData(ClientHttpResponse response) throws IOException {
    MediaType contentType = response.getHeaders().getContentType();
    if (contentType == null) {
        throw new RestClientException("Cannot extract response: no Content-Type found");
    }
    for (HttpMessageConverter messageConverter : messageConverters) {
        if (messageConverter.canRead(responseType, contentType)) {
            if (logger.isDebugEnabled()) {
                logger.debug("Reading [" + responseType.getName() + "] as \"" + contentType
                    +"\" using [" + messageConverte