calling Restful Service from Java

Question

Here I am not creating a RESTful service indeed I have to call an external Restful service from my java code. Currently I am implementing this using Apache HttpClient. The response that I get from the web service is in XML format. I need to extract the data from XML and put them on Java objects. Rather than using SAX parser, I heard that we can use JAX-RS and JERSEY which automatically maps the xml tags to corresponding java objects.

I have being looking through but unable to find a source to get started. I did look at existing links Consuming RESTful APIs using Java RESTful call in Java

Any help is appreciated in moving forward.

Thanks!!

Answer 1

UPDATE

as follow up with this: Can I do this way?? if the xml being returned as 4 ..... If I am constructing a Person object, I believe this will choke up. Can I just bind only the xml elements that I want? if Yes how can I do that.

You could map this XML as follows:

input.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Persons>
    <NumberOfPersons>2</NumberOfPersons>
        <Person>
            <Name>Jane</Name>
            <Age>40</Age>
        </Person>
        <Person>
            <Name>John</Name>
            <Age>50</Age>
        </Person>
</Persons> 

Persons

package forum7177628;

import java.util.List;

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessType;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessorType;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElement;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;

@XmlRootElement(name="Persons")
@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD)
public class Persons {

    @XmlElement(name="Person")
    private List<Person> people;

}

Person

package forum7177628;

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessType;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessorType;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElement;

@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD)
public class Person {

    @XmlElement(name="Name")
    private String name;

    @XmlElement(name="Age")
    private int age;

}

Demo

package forum7177628;

import java.io.File;

import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext;
import javax.xml.bind.Marshaller;
import javax.xml.bind.Unmarshaller;

public class Demo {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(Persons.class);

        Unmarshaller unmarshaller = jc.createUnmarshaller();
        Persons persons = (Persons) unmarshaller.unmarshal(new File("src/forum7177628/input.xml"));

        Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller();
        marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
        marshaller.marshal(persons, System.out);
    }

}

Output

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<Persons>
    <Person>
        <Name>Jane</Name>
        <Age>40</Age>
    </Person>
    <Person>
        <Name>John</Name>
        <Age>50</Age>
    </Person>
</Persons>

---

ORIGINAL ANSWER

Below is an example of calling a RESTful service using the Java SE APIs including JAXB:

String uri =
    "http://localhost:8080/CustomerService/rest/customers/1";
URL url = new URL(uri);
HttpURLConnection connection =
    (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
connection.setRequestMethod("GET");
connection.setRequestProperty("Accept", "application/xml");

JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(Customer.class);
InputStream xml = connection.getInputStream();
Customer customer =
    (Customer) jc.createUnmarshaller().unmarshal(xml);

connection.disconnect();

For More Information:

• http://blog.bdoughan.com/2010/08/creating-restful-web-service-part-55.html