How to get full REST request body using Jersey?

Question

How can one get the full HTTP REST request body for a POST request using Jersey?

In our case the data will be XML. Size would vary from 1K to 1MB.

The docs seem to indicate you should use MessageBodyReader but I can't see any examples.

Answer 1

It does seem you would have to use a MessageBodyReader here. Here's an example, using jdom:

import org.jdom.Document;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.MessageBodyReader;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.MediaType;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.MultivaluedMap;
import java.lang.reflect.Type;
import java.lang.annotation.Annotation;
import java.io.InputStream;

@Provider // this annotation is necessary!
@ConsumeMime("application/xml") // this is a hint to the system to only consume xml mime types
public class XMLMessageBodyReader implements MessageBodyReader<Document> {
  private SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder();

  public boolean isReadable(Class type, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations, MediaType mediaType) {
    // check if we're requesting a jdom Document
    return Document.class.isAssignableFrom(type);
  }

  public Document readFrom(Class type, Type genericType, Annotation[] annotations, MediaType mediaType, MultivaluedMap<String, String> httpHeaders, InputStream entityStream) {
    try {
      return builder.build(entityStream);
    }
    catch (Exception e) {
      // handle error somehow
    }
  } 
}

Add this class to the list of resources your jersey deployment will process (usually configured via web.xml, I think). You can then use this reader in one of your regular resource classes like this:

@Path("/somepath") @POST
public void handleXMLData(Document doc) {
  // do something with the document
}

I haven't verified that this works exactly as typed, but that's the gist of it. More reading here:

• http://weblogs.java.net/blog/mhadley/archive/2008/02/integrating_jer_2.html
• http://blogs.sun.com/sandoz/entry/jersey_and_abdera_with_a

Answer 2

Turns out you don't have to do much at all.

See below - the parameter x will contain the full HTTP body (which is XML in our case).

@POST
public Response go(String x) throws IOException {
    ...
}