Generic response support for feign client

Question

I am writing a REST client using Feign. There is an endpoint which can be generalized by parameterizing the path. But based on the path I can get a different type of response.

So I am trying to use a single method using generic. Since I must tell the method on the return type, I am parameterizing the type of the return value, like below,

@RequestLine("GET /objects/{type}/{model_id}")
public <T> Entity<T> getObject(
            @Param("type") String theObjectType, @Param("model_id") String theModelId,
            Class<T> theResponseClass);

But the problem is, Feign will use theResponseClass as body. How can I achieve a generic feign client method?

Answer 1

You could just use Feigns' generic Response type. Sadly it's not typesafe and requires to return the body as inputStream or byte[].

Like this:

  @RequestLine("GET /objects/{type}/{model_id}")
  public Response getMyData(@Param("model_id") String theModelId)
  {
    return Response.Builder.body(response).build();
  }