Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Reading and writing JAX-RS Link objects

JAX-RS contains a rather nice handy representation of the a Link that can be serialised with and adapter into XML and JSON, unfortunately there is a bug in the JAX-RS spec that means that the standard adapter provided is missing the setters required to deserialise the Link later on.

This isn't a problem if you are using the JAX-B RI as it appears to be more relaxed than the standard; but it will be a problem for other implementations. There is a further bug if you are using MOXy, aka EclipseLink, to produce either JSON or XML that it will fail and just call toString() because it doesn't like the type adapter being an inner class of the class that is being adapted. (Bug TBC)


Direction JAXB RI + JAX-RS Adapter MOXy + JAX-RS Adapter MOXy + Outer Adapter MOXy + Outer Adapter + Setters MOXy + Inner Adapter (Different class)
Marshalling Yes No Yes Yes Yes
Unmarshalling Yes No No Yes No


The workaround is to create a new adapter as a top level class in order to replace the one provided by the standard. Just quickly it would look something like this:

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;

import javax.ws.rs.core.Link;

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.adapters.XmlAdapter;
import javax.xml.namespace.QName;

public class LinkAdapter
    extends XmlAdapter {

    public LinkAdapter() {
    }

    public Link unmarshal(LinkJaxb p1) {
        
        Link.Builder builder = Link.fromUri(p1.getUri());
        for (Map.Entry<QName, Object> entry : p1.getParams().entrySet()) {
            builder.param(entry.getKey().getLocalPart(), entry.getValue().toString());
        }
        return builder.build();
    }

    public LinkJaxb marshal(Link p1) {
        
        Map<QName, Object> params = new HashMap<>();
        for (Map.Entry<String,String> entry : p1.getParams().entrySet()) {
            params.put(new QName("", entry.getKey()), entry.getValue());
        }
        return new LinkJaxb(p1.getUri(), params);
    }
}

With a simple POJO to go with it.

import java.net.URI;

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAnyAttribute;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAttribute;
import javax.xml.namespace.QName;

public class LinkJaxb  {

    private URI uri;
    private Map<QName, Object> params;


    public LinkJaxb() {
        this (null, null);
    }

    public LinkJaxb(URI uri) {
        this(uri, null);
    }

    public LinkJaxb(URI uri, Map<QName, Object> map) {
        
        this.uri = uri;
        this.params = map!=null ? map : new HashMap<QName, Object>();
        
    }



    @XmlAttribute(name = "href")
    public URI getUri() { 
        return uri;
    }

    @XmlAnyAttribute
    public Map<QName, Object> getParams() { 
        return params;
    }

    public void setUri(URI uri) {
        this.uri = uri;
    }

    public void setParams(Map<QName, Object> params) {
        this.params = params;
    }

}


With this you can read and write the Link objects to and from XML, and JSON with MOXy, to your hearts content.

5 comments:

Gili said...

Is there a bug report for the JAX-RS issue you mentioned (lack of setters)? If so, where?

Gerard Davison said...

The bug is referenced in the first line of the blog:

https://java.net/jira/browse/JAX_RS_SPEC-446

Gili said...

Got it. Thanks!

schrepfler said...

Would this work with Jackson (2) as a json provider as well?
I think I've asked this on this blog before but how would you compare this to the Spring HATEOAS library and can you generate HAL with it?

Gerard Davison said...

Srđan Šrepfler,

Sorry I don't think so; but i could be wrong, have you given it a go?

Gerard