Jersey: Default Cache Control to no-cache

Question

While writing a RESTful web service, I am encountering issues if I enable any sort of caching on my client (currently a .NET thick client). By default Jersey is not sending

Answer 1

Based on the solution by @martin-matula I created two Cache annotations. One @NoCache for no caching at all and one @CacheMaxAge for specific caching. The CacheMaxAge takes two arguments so you don't have to calculate the seconds yourself:

@GET
@CacheMaxAge(time = 10, unit = TimeUnit.MINUTES)
@Path("/awesome")
public String returnSomethingAwesome() {
    ...
}

The ResourceFilter now has this create method that by default doesn't interfere (so other caching mechanisms keep working):

@Override
public List create(AbstractMethod am) {
    if (am.isAnnotationPresent(CacheMaxAge.class)) {
        CacheMaxAge maxAge = am.getAnnotation(CacheMaxAge.class);
        return newCacheFilter("max-age: " + maxAge.unit().toSeconds(maxAge.time()));
    } else if (am.isAnnotationPresent(NoCache.class)) {
        return newCacheFilter("no-cache");
    } else {
        return Collections.emptyList();
    }
}

private List newCacheFilter(String content) {
    return Collections
            . singletonList(new CacheResponseFilter(content));
}

You can see the full solution in my blogpost.

Thanks for the solution Martin!