What does context annotation do in Spring?

Question

In Rest API design, I am wondering what the exact purpose of the context annotation is?

private HttpServletRequest request;

 @Context
 public void setRequest(final HttpServletRequest req) {
        request = req;
 }

Answer 1

The purpose is to indicate that the request property should be set from the context.

@Context is used to inject various HTTP-ish contextual data, from here:

In general @Context can be used to obtain contextual Java types related to the request or response.

API docs (Not horribly useful IMO. Or, perhaps more accurately, horribly-useful.)

Answer 2

This annotation is used to inject information into a class field, bean property or method parameter.

JAX-RS @Context to get the ServletContext, and WebApplicationContextUtils to get the Spring application context, with this Spring application context, you are able to access and get beans from Spring container