Parse a JSON response as an object

Question

Good evening,
I am a newbie in web services and i just want to write a simple client that simply gets responses from REST calls.
I downloaded and added jersey-bundle-1.17.1.jar to my build path and i found a working piece of code that makes a REST call to a url and returns a response as a String.

import javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType;

import com.sun.jersey.api.client.Client;
import com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientResponse;
import com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource;

public class TestJerseyClient {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            Client client = Client.create();
            WebResource webResource = client
                    .resource("http://path/to/service");

            ClientResponse response = webResource
                    .accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
                    .get(ClientResponse.class);

            if (response.getStatus() != 200)
                throw new RuntimeException("Failed : HTTP error code : " + response.getStatus());

            String output = response.getEntity(String.class);

            System.out.println("Output from Server .... \n");
            System.out.println(output);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

But i don't want to do string manipulations to get the parts of the response that im interested in.

I would prefer a more structured approach, like getting an Object instead of a string
(a JSON Object, a Map<K,V> Object, etc...)

---

TRY#1 - Map<K,V>

Sep 15, 2013 2:46:13 AM com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientResponse getEntity
SEVERE: A message body reader for Java class java.util.Map, and Java type java.util.Map<java.lang.String, java.lang.Object>, and MIME media type application/json; charset=UTF-8 was not found
Sep 15, 2013 2:46:13 AM com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientResponse getEntity
SEVERE: The registered message body readers compatible with the MIME media type are:
application/json; charset=UTF-8 ->
  com.sun.jersey.json.impl.provider.entity.JSONJAXBElementProvider$App
  com.sun.jersey.json.impl.provider.entity.JSONRootElementProvider$App
  com.sun.jersey.json.impl.provider.entity.JSONListElementProvider$App
*/* ->
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.FormProvider
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.StringProvider
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.ByteArrayProvider
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.FileProvider
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.InputStreamProvider
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.DataSourceProvider
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.XMLJAXBElementProvider$General
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.ReaderProvider
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.DocumentProvider
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.SourceProvider$StreamSourceReader
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.SourceProvider$SAXSourceReader
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.SourceProvider$DOMSourceReader
  com.sun.jersey.json.impl.provider.entity.JSONJAXBElementProvider$General
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.XMLRootElementProvider$General
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.XMLListElementProvider$General
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.XMLRootObjectProvider$General
  com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.entity.EntityHolderReader
  com.sun.jersey.json.impl.provider.entity.JSONRootElementProvider$General
  com.sun.jersey.json.impl.provider.entity.JSONListElementProvider$General

com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientHandlerException: A message body reader for Java class java.util.Map, and Java type java.util.Map<java.lang.String, java.lang.Object>, and MIME media type application/json; charset=UTF-8 was not found
    at com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientResponse.getEntity(ClientResponse.java:561)
    at com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientResponse.getEntity(ClientResponse.java:535)
    at com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource.handle(WebResource.java:696)
    at com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource.access$300(WebResource.java:74)
    at com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource$Builder.get(WebResource.java:512)
    at rest.TestJerseyClientAdvanced.main(TestJerseyClientAdvanced.java:36)

Answer 1

If you need to get only few properties from big JSON response, you can use Jersey client and JsonArray or JsonObject entity.

String url = "http://api.goeuro.com/api/v2/position/suggest/en/";
String city = "New York";

Client client = ClientBuilder.newClient();
WebTarget webTarget = client.register(JsonProcessingFeature.class).target(url);
JsonArray jsonArray = webTarget.path(city)
    .request(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE).get(JsonArray.class);

for (JsonObject jsonObject : jsonArray.getValuesAs(JsonObject.class)) {
    JsonObject geoPosition = jsonObject.getJsonObject("geo_position");
    System.out.println(Arrays.asList(
        jsonObject.getString("name"), jsonObject.getString("type"),
        geoPosition.get("latitude"), geoPosition.get("longitude")));
}

Maven dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jersey-client</artifactId>
    <version>2.22.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.media</groupId>
    <artifactId>jersey-media-json-processing</artifactId>
    <version>2.22.1</version>
</dependency>

Answer 2

I recommend you use Jackson for (un)marshalling JSON responses. This can be done is two steps as below.

Step1. create a java bean with member/object names that match the expected response. e.g, MyResponse.class

Step2. use the java bean when reading the entity from the client response.

private static ClientConfig clientConfig = new DefaultClientConfig();
clientConfig.getFeatures().put(JSONConfiguration.FEATURE_POJO_MAPPING, Boolean.TRUE);

ClientResponse response =  Client.create(clientConfig).
            resource(uri).accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON).
            header("content-type", MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON).
            get(MY_RESPONSE.class); 
MyResponse output = response.getEntity(MyResponse.class);