CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javarestjerseyjax-rs
janneob
janneob

Reputation: 959

Polymorphism in RESTFul server

I have 3 classes. A is abstract class, B and C extends A. I want to be able to get a JSON in a POST (A) and then to decide what type it is and to convert to the correct type. in other words to use only one end point for both B and C. The same I want to do in GET, I want to get a one list that contains B and C objects. Does it possible?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1942

Answers (2)

sschrass
sschrass

Reputation: 7166

A, B and C usually have names, like Animal, Dog and Cat. Therefore those are different resources like /animal, /animal/dog and /animal/cat. Following this rule, you can determine the type by the requestUrl. A http-post for /animal/dog should result in a dog resource and a /animal/cat in a cat. Both http-post could use the same JSON of course.

For http-get, the requested resouce might be /animals containing a combined list of the resources /animal/cats (list of all /animal/cat) and /animal/dogs (a list of all /animal/dog)

If you go down the path your are mentioning in your question, you can just dump everything to /stuff like cats, dogs, tricycles, contracts, space ships ... Not very restful.

Upvotes: 0

Cecilia Arenas
Cecilia Arenas

Reputation: 163

Yes, it is possible, what you want is to be able to handle polymorphic types. There are many frameworks that could help you, I personally use jackson 2, you can check here for an example:

https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-annotations#handling-polymorphic-types

Upvotes: 2

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