Question

I will start with: I am doing something terribly wrong. And here is what I am doing wrong.

I created a REST resource for searching something and I am expecting a JSON data in request parameters:

@GET
@Path("/device")
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
@Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response searchContent(String searchJSONString) {
    String message = new SearchServices().search(searchJSONString);

    return getResponse(message); //Checks the message for any error and sends back the response.
}//end of searchContent()

I should not have written:

@Consumes

since it is a GET resource and it does not consumes anything. But my problem is how to send JSON data in a java code for this (GET resource). I tried curl command which is able to send JSON data to this resource but not a java code by any means.

I tried following curl command to send JSON data to it:

curl -X GET -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"keyword":"hello"}' http://localhost:8080/search-test/rest/search

And its working fine and giving me back a proper JSON response.

But if I am using a curl command without specifying any method (which should be a default http get), I am getting a 405 (Method not allowed) response from tomcat:

curl -d '{"keyword":"hello"}' http://localhost:8080/search-test/rest/search

or through Java code:

HttpURLConnection urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(urlString).openConnection();
urlConnection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json");
urlConnection.setRequestMethod("GET");  //This is not working.

getting the same 405 (Method not allowed) response from tomcat.

If I am sending a GET request using java code, I am not able to send the JSON data as in a post method, and I am forced to use a name=value thing and for that I need to change my REST resource to accept it as a name/value pair.

It means something like this:

http://localhost:8080/search-test/rest/search?param={"keyword":"permission"}

If I am doing something similar in POST:

@POST
@Path("/device")
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
@Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response searchContent(String searchJSONString) {
    String message = new SearchServices().search(searchJSONString);

    return getResponse(message); //Checks the message for any error and sends back the response.
}//end of searchContent()

I am able to send the JSON data both from Java code and curl command as well:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"keyword":"hello"}' http://localhost:8080/search-test/rest/search

or through Java code:

HttpURLConnection urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(urlString).openConnection();
urlConnection.setRequestMethod("POST");  //Works fine.
urlConnection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json");
urlConnection.setDoOutput(true);

Where is the problem? Why am I not able to send it from code but from curl? Is there any other way to send JSON data to the GET resource other than a name=value pair?

Answer 1

HttpURLConnection does not allow GET requests with entity and will strip the entity from the request before it is sent to the server. So, I’d strongly recommend avoiding it as even if you use a different Java HTTP client library that allows you to do it, your users will likely run into similar issues (plus web caches and proxies may add more problems).