POST complex parameters To REST service, Can I use a mock form submission

Question

I recently asked this question: Question I asked recently

I like the restful way that link is represented BTW. The question was essentially how do I get complex parameters to my REST service? What would the code and parameters of that code look like? Well, the more I thought about it, the more it reminded me of a simple a web form submission. Keep in mind that the clients of this service are going to be native applications. Why can't the client applications assemble the variables in questions into a post request Key-value object (including a byte array-file), bundle that and send it to my service where the appropriate action/response will occur? Pretty sure that Java (RESTEasy is the framework I am using) can handle the request gracefully. Am I crazy or has this already been worked out?

As an example of how this would look does anybody have a sample HTML string that would represent a simple post of a couple of variables, like this?

{
  "restriction-type": "boolean-search-restriction",
  "boolean-logic": "and",
  "restrictions": [
    {
      "restriction-type": "property-search-restriction",
      "property": {
        "name": "name",
        "type": "STRING"
      },
      "match-mode": "EXACTLY_MATCHES",
      "value": "admin"
    },
    {
      "restriction-type": "property-search-restriction",
      "property": {
        "name": "email",
        "type": "STRING"
      },
      "match-mode": "EXACTLY_MATCHES",
      "value": "admin@example.com"
    }
  ]
}

But with html headers and all??? I got that example from here btw: example JSON post

Answer 1

The RestEasy framework already provides a JAX-RS client implementation unless if you want to start from scratch using HttpURLConnection or even HttpClient from Apache HttpComponents. Anyhow as long as the question is related to RESTEasy I will provide an example on the latter framework.

If the post looks like this :

@Path("/client")
public class ClientResource {

        @POST
        @Consumes("application/json")
        @Produces("application/json")
        public Response addClient(Client aClient) {
                String addMessage=clientService.save(aClient);
                return Response.status(201).entity(addMessage).build();
        }
        ...
}

A basicRestEasy Client call would look like this :

    public void testClientPost() {

        try {

            ClientRequest request = new ClientRequest(
                    "http://localhost:8080/RestService/client");
            request.accept("application/json");
            Client client=new Client(5,"name","login","password"); 
            //convert your object to json with Google gson 
            //https://github.com/google/gson
            String input = gson.toJson(client);
            request.body("application/json", input);
            ClientResponse<String> response = request.post(String.class);
            if (response.getStatus() != 201) {
                throw new RuntimeException("Failed : HTTP error code : "
                        + response.getStatus());
            }
            //this is used to read the response.
            BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
                    new ByteArrayInputStream(response.getEntity().getBytes())));

            String output;
            System.out.println("Output from Server .... \n");
            while ((output = br.readLine()) != null) {
                System.out.println(output);
            }

        } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }