How do we send unannotated method parameter in request using Jersey?

Question

Today when I am going though Jersey documentation I came across the following statement

 Unlike method parameters that are associated with the extraction of request parameters, 
 the method parameter associated with the representation being consumed does not require 
 annotating.  A maximum of one such unannotated method parameter may exist since there 
 may only be a maximum of one such representation sent in a request.

I am new to JAX-RS hence not very clear with the way we send such a parameter in a request (I don't find any concrete example to understand better)

From the above statement what i understand is, we could have a resource method some think like

 @Path("restful")
 public class MyResource{
   ...
   @GET
   @Produces("application/text")
   public String getStringResp(String param){
      ...
      return "some value";
   }
   ....
 }

Here we are not using any annotated parameter like path, matrix, query or any other params.

Now my question is, at client side how could we send a value to the method parameter "param"? We could use the api methods like queryparam() etc., on "webtarget" or "invocationBuilder" to send a request param if the param is annotated repectively. Here it is not the case.

Please help me out in understanding this?

Thanks in advance

Paul Samsotha Paul Samsotha · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-23T01:01:22

First thing to understand is that request have mainly two parts, the body and the headers. What the documentation you posted is saying, is that an annotation-less parameter, is ultimately the body of the request.

You normally wouldn't send any entity body with a GET request, but for PUT and POST, there are put(Entity<?> entity) and post(Entity<?> entity), which Ivocation.Builder inherits from SyncInvoker.

The Entity class has static methods from which we can form the entity body. For example

                        // application/json data
target.request().post(Entity.json(jsonStringDataOrPojo));

                        // application/xml data
target.request().post(Entity.xml(xmlStringDataOrPojo));

                        // text/plain data
target.request().post(Entity.entity(stringData, MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN));

                        // text/plain data 
target.request().post(Entity.text(stringData));

In you case, with String, you could actually send any one of these. Since you haven't specified @Consumes annotation on your resource method, it could be plain text xml or json. For xml and json, you would just get the data in raw form.

If you had

@POST
@Consumes(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN)
public Response postString(String param){

Then you would need to send it plain text, i.e. one of the last of the above examples

See more information on using the Client API

How do we send unannotated method parameter in request using Jersey?

2 Answers