Handling multiple parameters in a URI (RESTfully) in Java

Question

I\'ve been working on a small scale web service in Java/Jersey which reads lists of user information from clients contained in XML files. I currently have this functioning i

Answer 1

You cannot use '=' in the URL path since it's a reserved character. However there are many other character you can use as delimiters such as '-' and ','. So instead of '=' you can use '-'. If you really really want to use '=' then you will have to URL-encode it; however, I would strongly recommend against this because it may make things more complicated then it should be.

You can see the grammar of the URL string here:

http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/url-spec.txt

Copy and search the following string to skip to the path grammar:

 path                    void |  segment  [  / path ] 

 segment                 xpalphas

That said, I believe HTTP request is usually used for request single resource only. So my personal opinion is to not implement the service the way you implemented. For getting multiple clients I would use query parameters as filters like this:

Client/{cName}/users?filters=<value1>,<value2> ...

Edit: From the business case you got there, it seems like you probably need service like

/users?<filters>
/clients?<filters>

So say you want to get Peter from all clients then can have a request of this form:

/users?name=Peter

Similarly, if you want to get Jack and Peter from Starbucks then you can do:

/users?name=Peter,Jack&client=Starbucks

Hopefully this helps.

Answer 2

Query strings have the following syntax and you can have multiple parameters with the same name:

http://server/path/program?<query_string>

where query_string has the following syntax:

field1=value1&field1=value2&field1=value3…

For more details check out this entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string