Required @QueryParam in JAX-RS (and what to do in their absence)

Question

I deploy a web-services component to JBoss Application Server 7 using the RESTEasy JAX-RS implementation.

Is there an annotation av

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem and decided that I did not want a gazillion boilerplate null checks scattered across my REST code, so this this is what I decided to do:

1. Create an annotation that causes an exception to be thrown when a required parameter is not specified.
2. Handle the thrown exception the same way I handle all other exceptions thrown in my REST code.

For 1), i implemented the following annotation:

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

@Target(ElementType.PARAMETER)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Documented
public @interface Required
{
    // This is just a marker annotation, so nothing in here.
}

... and the following JAX-RS ContainerRequestFilter to enforce it:

import java.lang.reflect.Parameter;
import javax.ws.rs.QueryParam;
import javax.ws.rs.container.ContainerRequestContext;
import javax.ws.rs.container.ContainerRequestFilter;
import javax.ws.rs.container.ResourceInfo;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Context;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;

@Provider
public class RequiredParameterFilter implements ContainerRequestFilter
{
    @Context
    private ResourceInfo resourceInfo;

    @Override
    public void filter(ContainerRequestContext requestContext)
    {
        // Loop through each parameter
        for (Parameter parameter : resourceInfo.getResourceMethod().getParameters())
        {
            // Check is this parameter is a query parameter
            QueryParam queryAnnotation = parameter.getAnnotation(QueryParam.class);

            // ... and whether it is a required one
            if (queryAnnotation != null && parameter.isAnnotationPresent(Required.class))
            {
                // ... and whether it was not specified
                if (!requestContext.getUriInfo().getQueryParameters().containsKey(queryAnnotation.value()))
                {
                    // We pass the query variable name to the constructor so that the exception can generate a meaningful error message
                    throw new YourCustomRuntimeException(queryAnnotation.value());
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

You need to register the ContainerRequestFilter in the same way you would register your other @Provider classes with your JAX-RS library. Maybe RESTEasy does it for you automatically.

For 2), I handle all runtime exceptions using a generic JAX-RS ExceptionMapper:

import javax.ws.rs.core.Response;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.ExceptionMapper;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;

@Provider
public class MyExceptionMapper implements ExceptionMapper
{
    @Override
    public Response toResponse(RuntimeException ex)
    {
        // In this example, we just return the .toString() of the exception. 
        // You might want to wrap this in a JSON structure if this is a JSON API, for example.
        return Response
            .status(Response.Status.BAD_REQUEST)
            .entity(ex.toString())
            .build();
    }
}

As before, remember to register the class with your JAX-RS library.