Question

The goal is to create a rest-full web service using JAX-RS that will selectively return the result either in json or xml format, depending on the user request. For example, if the user issues a GET request in the following fashion the results will be returned in json format:

http://api.myurl.com/order/1234.json

Similarly, if the user issues a get in the following request, the results will be returned in xml format:

http://api.myurl.com/order/123.xml

I don’t want to use request parameters to do this (i.e. http://api.myurl.com/order/123?format=json). Using the .json or .xml post-fix seems more intuitive to me.

What would be the best strategy for doing this using the JAX-RS api?

Answer 1

One way would be to use @Path annotations more thoroughly:

@GET
@Path("/order/{id}.xml")
@Produces("application/xml")
public Order getOrderAsXML(@PathParam("id") int id) {
    return realGetOrder(id);
}

@GET
@Path("/order/{id}.json")
@Produces("application/json")
public Order getOrderAsJSON(@PathParam("id") int id) {
    return realGetOrder(id);
}

private Order realGetOrder(int id) {
    // ...
}

However I’d be inclined to have a single method serving up both and let the client and supporting JAX-RS framework use content negotiation to decide the serialization method.