Timeout webservice call from client side

Question

I'm calling a webservice using RestEasy Client. One requirement is to abort/timeout the call if it runs for more that 5 seconds. How would I achieve this with RestEasy Client? I have only seen server side timeout, i.e. the Rest Easy websevice will timeout the request if it's not fulfilled within a certain time.

Answer 1

A RESTEasy client typically uses Apache HttpClient to handle the network conversation.

You can override the HttpClient properties with your own custom timeout parameters:

DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpParams params = httpClient.getParams();
HttpConnectionParams.setConnectionTimeout(params, connectionTimeoutMillis);
HttpConnectionParams.setSoTimeout(params, socketTimeoutMillis);

The first param allows you to specify timeout establishing the initial connection and the second allows you to specify the maximum period of time in which a socket will wait while no data is sent.

You can use the modified HttpClient to build your ClientExecutor:

ClientExecutor executor = new ApacheHttpClient4Executor(httpClient);

Which can be used in turn to build a ClientRequest object. Or you can inject it into a RestClientProxyFactoryBean if you are using a Spring configuration for RESTEasy.

It's not exactly the same as an absolute 5 second timeout, but depending on what you are trying to accomplish, tweaking these two properties will usually fill the bill.