Question

I am new to RESTful services and their implementation on Spring 3. I would like your opinion on the best practices for returning type when a client creates a new resource in my server.

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST, 
value = "/organisation", 
headers = "content-type=application/xml")
@ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.CREATED)
public ??? createOrganisation(@RequestBody String xml) 
{
    StreamSource source = new StreamSource(new StringReader(xml));
    Organisation organisation = (Organisation) castorMarshaller.unmarshal(source);
    // save 
    return ???;
}

Answer 1

A simple choice would be javax.ws.rs.core.Response, found in the Java EE’s own restful services package. It – simply – tells what the web server should answer to the HTTP request.
For instance:

if (organisation != null)
  return Response.ok().build();
else
  return Response.serverError().build();

Custom response headers and other exotic things like that are possible with that return type too, but I don’t think that would match with “best practices”.

---

uh, I missed that @ResponseStatus(HttpStatus.CREATED)… I guess my answer was not much of help.

Maybe this will help instead: How to return generated ID in RESTful POST?