Question

I have a table with a CLOB field (MySQL MediumText).

I want to return an input stream to that CLOB.
My resource code looks like this:

@GET
public StreamingOutput getAsStream(int id) {
  try {
    // prepare the statement object
    ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery();
    if (rs.next()) return new StreamingOutput() {
      public void write(OutputStream outputStream) throws ... {
        copy(rs.getBinaryStream(1), outputStream);
      }
    }
  }
  finally {
    rs.close();
    stmt.close();
    connection.close();
  }
}

Which doesn’t look right. The code closes the db resources (resultset, statement and connection) before Jersey has a chance to write the stream to the response.

I can close the db resources in the StreamingOutput.write method. But it also does not feel right – I’m letting some outside container close my resources.

The last idea I can think of is to read the entire stream into memory and then send it. I don’t want to do it of course.

So, anyone got any better idea?

I checked Return a file using Java Jersey which didn’t help much.

Thanks,
Doron

Answer 1

Yes, your code as shown will not work. You created an anonymous inner class in your method and then handed it as the return object to the container. The write object in the new class doesn’t actually get invoked until sometime after your method has already completed, at which time of course you have already closed up all your connections.

Conceptually, trying to stream directly from the database is probably not a good idea. You don’t want to hold open a connection for the amount of time the client decides to take in consuming the input stream. The best thing to do is read the data into memory, and then stream that data to the client.