Question

I am using sitebricks-client to interact with REST APIs in Java. I need to do a POST with a non-empty body. How do I do that in sitebricks?

Answer 1

You have not specified what kind of request body you are trying to post. If you are trying to send a String with a Content-Type of “text/plain”, then the following should work:

String body = "Request body.";
WebResponse response = web.clientOf(url)
    .transports(String.class)
    .over(Text.class)
    .post(body);

If you are trying to send data of a particular type that you have already serialized to a String, you can set the Content-Type header manually:

String body = "{}";
Map<String, String> headers = new HashMap<String, String>();
headers.put("Content-Type", "application/json");
WebResponse response = web.clientOf(url, headers)
    .transports(String.class)
    .over(Text.class)
    .post(body);

If you have a Map containing data that you would like to send to the server with a Content-Type of “application/json”, then something like this might be up your alley:

Map body = new HashMap();
// Fill in body with data
WebResponse response = web.clientOf(url)
    .transports(Map.class)
    .over(Json.class)
    .post(body);

There are two important points to pay attention to in the examples above:

• The value passed to the post method should be of the type passed to the transports method.
• The class that you pass to the over method determines the default value of the Content-Type header and the way in which the value passed to the post method is serialized. The class should be a subclass of com.google.sitebricks.client.Transport, and you will probably want to choose one of the classes found in the com.google.sitebricks.client.transport package.