Marshal/Un marshal List objects in Jersey JAX-RS using JAXB

Question

Good Morning. Today morning when I am going through Jersey Entity providers MessageBodyReaders and MessageBodyWriters I came across the following probl

Answer 1

First

You don't need your own MessageBodyWriter/Reader. Jersey/JAX-RS alread has standard support for this. I would stick with the default, unless you have a really, really good reason for needed to whip up your own.

Second

We don't need the wrapper, you can simple return a GenericEntity. This will automatically wrap the elements in a "plural wrapper" element, i.e. <product> -> <products>.

List<Product> list = new ArrayList<>();
GenericEntity<List<String>> entity = new GenericEntity<List<Product>>(list) {};
Response response = Response.ok(entity).build();

For accepting a body in resource method, simply accepting List<Product> as an argument is enough. It will accept <products><product/><product/></products>

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UPDATE

To retrieve the List<Product> on the client side, we should make use of GenericType. Se this post.

Jersey 1

WebResource resource = client.resource("...");
List<Product> products = resource.get(new GenericType<List<Product>>(){});

Jersey 2/JAX-RS 2

Response response = ...
List<Product> products = response.readEntity(new GenericType<List<Product>>(){});