Question

I am trying to develop a REST service with Spring 3.1 where users can access information. A resource can easily be accessed by app/courses/1 to retrieve a course by it’s id.

However, I want to make it possible to search. Here is the model:

public class Course {

    private Long id;

    private String name;

    private Long points;

    private Long numberOfParticipants;
}

For example, what if I wanted to fetch a Course that has name=foo and points=1337, the corresponding query string would be as follows: app/courses?name=foo&points=1337.

I have come up with a temporary solution:

@RequestMapping(value = "courses")
@ResponseBody
public Course getCourse(@RequestParam(value = "name", required = false) String name,
                        @RequestParam(value ="points", required = false) Long points) {

    // TODO
    // Find and return course from the database.
}

However, this seems very tedious and messy, my question is therefore: does Spring have something that simplifies this a bit so I don’t have to harvest all the attributes the hard way?

Answer 1

@RequestMapping(value = "/courses")
@ResponseBody
public Course getCourse(Course course) {

}

This will map all request parameters to fields of a Course command object.