JAX-RS @PathParam How to pass a String with slashes, hyphens & equals too

Question

I am new to JAX-RS and I am trying to use Jersey to build a simple RESTful Webservice.

I have 2 questions. Please clarify these:

1. I am trying to have my simple webservice like this URL http://localhost:8080/SampleJersey/rest/inchi/InChIName

   The InChIName is a string like this InChI=1S/C9H8O4/c1-6(10)13-8-5-3-2-4-7(8)9(11)12/h2- 5H,1H3,(H,11,12). How do I pass this as a @PathParam, I mean a normal String is working fine but here there are slashes,hyphens, and commas. How do I make it to ignore these. I tried putting it in quotes, but that didnt work. How should I do this?

2. I need to pass that InChI to another webservice and that returns an XML as an output and I want to display that XML output as my Webservice's output. If I have @Produces("application/xml") will it work?

This is my code:

@Path("/inchi")
public class InChIto3D {
    @GET
    @Path("{inchiname}")
    @Produces("application/xml")
    public String get3DCoordinates(@PathParam("inchiname")String inchiName) {
        String ne="";
        try{
            URL eutilsurl = new URL(
                      "http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?"
                      + "db=pccompound&term=%22"+inchiName+"%22[inchi]");
            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                                    new InputStreamReader(eutilsurl.openStream()));
            String inputline;
            while ((inputline=in.readLine())!=null)
                ne=ne+inputline;
        }catch (MalformedURLException e1) {
        }catch (IOException e2){
        }
        return ne;
    }
}

Answer 1

You should be able to use a hyphen fine. Not sure about how to escape slashes.

Answer 2

The parameters should be URL encoded. You can use java.net.URLEncoder for this.

String encodedParam = URLEncoder.encode(unencodedParam, "UTF-8");

The / will then be translated to %2F.

Answer 3

I got this to work using @QueryParam() rather than @PathParam.

@Path("/inchi")
public class InChIto3D {
    @GET
    //@Path("{inchiname}")
    @Produces("application/xml")
    public String get3DCoordinates(@QueryParam("inchiname") String inchiName) {
          String ne="";
          try{
              URL eutilsurl = new URL(
                      "http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?"
                      + "db=pccompound&term=%22"+inchiName+"%22[inchi]");
              BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                                new InputStreamReader(eutilsurl.openStream()));
             String inputline;
             while ((inputline=in.readLine())!=null)
                 ne=ne+inputline;
          }catch (MalformedURLException e1) {
          }catch (IOException e2){
          }
          return ne;
    }
}

Thus the URL structure would be like this http://myrestservice.com/rest/inchi?inchiname=InChIhere

With @PathParam I read in the API that it will not accept slashes. I am wondering if I can use any Regular Expression in @Path just to ignore all slashes in the string that would be entered in quotes" ".

Answer 4

Tomcat does not Accept %2F in URLs: http://tomcat.apache.org/security-6.html. You can turn off this behavior.