JUnit 5 is the latest version of Junit. It has a brand new architecture and more capabilities compared to the previous generation of Junit. In this article, we will quickly go through some of the main features and concepts of JUnit 5. In this Article we will start with our first JUnit 5 Test.
Table of Content
JUnit5 Writing first Test
JUnit 5 is the latest version of Junit. It has a brand new architecture and more capabilities compared to the previous generation of Junit. In this article, we will quickly go through some of the main features and concepts of JUnit 5. In this Article we will start with our first JUnit 5 Test.
SimpleHelloTest
First Junit5 Test. This test has only one test method which asserts that the message string is equal to "hello"
package com.bootng.start;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;
import static org.junit.jupiter.api.Assertions.assertEquals;
public class SimpleHelloTest {
@Test
public void test_hello() {
String msg = "hello";
assertEquals(msg, "hello", " message is equal Hello");
}
}
When running this test, the test will surely pass since the assert condition will be successfull.
JUnit 5 is the latest version of Junit. It has a brand new architecture and more capabilities compared to the previous generation of Junit. In this article, we will quickly go through some of the main features and concepts of JUnit 5.
JUnit 5 is the latest version of JUnit. It has a brand new architecture and more capabilities compared to the previous generation of JUnit. In this article, we will quickly go through some of the main features and concepts of JUnit 5 through hands on examples.
JUnit 5 Project
JUnit 5 is composed of mainly three sub-projects JUnit Platform, JUnit Jupiter, and JUnit Vintage.
junit-jupiter-api (JUnit Platform): JUnit Jupiter API for writing tests and extensions. junit-jupiter-engine(JUnit Jupiter) : JUnit Jupiter test engine implementation, only required atruntime. junit-vintage-engine:(JUnit Vintage): To run tests wittern in older version of JUnit on JUnit 5 Platform.
This article is focused on JUnit5 with maven as a build tool. Other than the maven related configurations information in this articles holds true for other build environments also.
Java 8
JUnit 5 requires a minimum Java 8 version
JUnit 5 Artifacts
If you’re using Maven you can add the corresponding subprojects in your pom file (juinit-jupiter-api, junit-jupiter-engine, junit-vintage-engine).
Starting with Juinit 5.4 we can also simply add aggregate artifact named junit-jupiter in our pom.xml to include all the JUnit 5 related dependencies to our project.
Supports Lambda expressions.
Nested Unit Tests
Parameterized Unit Tests
Conditional Test inclusion or exclusion
Extension Model
Main Annotations
Tests written in JUnit5 follow some standard approach and it is done by utilizing the capabilities provided by the JUnit 5 framework. The following are some of the annotations provided by JUnit 5. This is just to provide some quick pointers to the rich feature sets of JUnit 5.
Common annotations
@Test – denotes a test method, it does not take any arguments.
@DisplayName – specifies a custom name for the test class or method.
@DisplayNameGeneration - specify a generator to generate a custom name for method or class.
@Nested - it marks a class a nested test
@Disabled – prevents a test class or method from executing;
@BeforeEach,
@AfterEach – runs the annotated method before or after each test method in the same class.
@BeforeAll,
@AfterAll – runs the annotated method before any or after all of the test methods in the class.
An assertion is a java statement. An assertion statement is used in the code to ensures the correctness of any assumptions on which the program depends. When the java runtime executes the assert statement it will throw assertion exception.
Assertion helps in maintaining the invariants in a program under check.
We will explore how to use the assertion statement with an example.
An assertion is a java statement. An assertion statement is used in the code to ensures the correctness of any assumptions on which the program depends. When the java runtime executes the assert statement it will throw assertion exception.
Assertion helps in maintaining the invariants in a program under check.
We will explore how to use the assertion statement with an example.
Syntax for assertion
The following are the two different syntaxes for using assertion.
First way
If the expression is false the assert statement will throw java.lang.AssertionError
assert expression;
Second way
With two expressions where expression1 must be a boolean expression.
and expression2 must return a value (must not return void).
if exprerssion1 is false, the assert statement will throw java.lang.AssertError with expression2 as the message
assert expression1 : expression2;
By default assertion is disabled we can enable it by setting the jvm parameter ea or enableassertions.
Enabling assertion
By default, assertions are disabled in Java. If assertions are disabled, assertion statements do not have any effects. In order to enable them, we use the following command
In the following example, we have a Movie object containing movie name and minAge. From the main class we
create a movie object and call the play method only if the minimum age requirement is met.
Movie.java
class Movie {
private String title;
private int minAge;
public Movie(String title, int age) {
this.title = title;
this.minAge = age;
}
public void play() {
System.out.print("Playing movie: " + title);
}
public String getTitle() {
return title;
}
public int getAgeRestriction() {
return minAge;
}
}
JavaAssertionTest
public class JavaAssertionTest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Movie movieA = new Movie("movie 007 James bond", 11);
Movie movieB = new Movie("movie Transformers", 18);
//We want to play only movies suitable for age 11 or under
assert (movieA.getAgeRestriction() <= 18);
movieA.play();
assert (movieB.getAgeRestriction() <= 11): "Underage for movie" + movieB.getTitle();
movieB.play();
System.out.println("played with all movies");
}
}
Running the above example will result in the following output.
Console Output
Playing movie movie 007 James bond
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.AssertionError: Underage for moviemovie Transformers
at JavaAssertionTest.main(JavaAssertionTest.java:12)
Note in the above case the moment the assertion error is thrown, the program will exit.
Handling AssertionErrror
If an assertion error occurs the program will throw exception and exit. If we want to handle the assertion error, we can put the assert statement within a try-catch block. And in the catch block, we can have our logic if assert statement. The following example shows the same.
With Try Catch block
public static void main(String[] args) {
Movie movieA = new Movie("movie 007 James bond", 11);
Movie movieB = new Movie("movie Transformers", 18);
System.out.println("Start playing movies");
//We want to play only movies suitable for age 11 or under
assert (movieA.getAgeRestriction() <= 18);
movieA.play();
try {
assert (movieB.getAgeRestriction() <= 11): "Underage for movie with title:: " + movieB.getTitle();
movieB.play();
}catch (AssertionError e) {
System.out.println("Oops this movie cannot be played because " + e.getMessage());
}
System.out.println("played with all movies");
}
Console output
Start playing movies
Playing movie: movie 007 James bond
Oops this movie cannot be played because Underage for movie with title:: movie Transformers
played with all movies
Summary
assertions are a great way to confirm program invariants hold true.
we have two different syntaxes for writing assertion in java.
by default assertions are turned off, we can turn on using JVM flag.
if an assert statement fails, the program will throw AssertionError and exit.
we can catch AssertionError, and still get hold control of the program.
In our earlier articles, we learned how to create rest full API's . In this article, we will learn how to invoke or call Rest full API's in spring boot. Essentially we are going to write a simple client to consume a few public RESTful API's. RESTTemplate is for just that, Spring's RESTTemplate is used to write client applications to consume RESTful API
In our earlier articles, we learned how to create rest full API's . In this article, we will learn how to invoke or call Rest full API's in spring boot. Essentially we are going to write a simple client to consume a few public RESTful API's. RESTTemplate is for just that, Spring's RESTTemplate is used to write client applications to consume RESTful API
In this article, we will consume two different public API. For that, we will write a standalone Spring Boot App, to consumes the REST API's as follows
API 1: Get all GitHub API's
GET https://api.github.com
API 2: Get all Github repositories for user bootng
GET https://api.github.com/users/bootng/repos
Technologies Used
Java 11
Apache Maven 3.5.0
Spring Boot 2.2.6
Eclipse IDE
Main Application Class
package com.javaexp;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
@SpringBootApplication
public class ResttemplateApplication {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ResttemplateApplication.class);
public static void main(String args[]) {
log.info("about to call ResttemplateApplication.run()");
SpringApplication.run(ResttemplateApplication.class, args);
log.info("completed executing ResttemplateApplication.run()");
}
}
Our first REST client is as bellow, which calls a REST endpoint and then displays results in the console.
LoadAllGithubEndpoints.java
package com.bootng;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.Map.Entry;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.springframework.boot.CommandLineRunner;
import org.springframework.boot.web.client.RestTemplateBuilder;
import org.springframework.core.annotation.Order;
import org.springframework.http.ResponseEntity;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
import org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonNode;
/**
* This Class List all the endpoints from URL https://api.github.com
*
*/
@Component
@Order(1)
public class LoadAllGithubEndpoints implements CommandLineRunner {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ResttemplateApplication.class);
@Override
public void run(String... args) throws Exception {
log.info("about to call LoadAllEndpoint.run()");
RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplateBuilder().build();
ResponseEntity<JsonNode> apis =
restTemplate.getForEntity("https://api.github.com", JsonNode.class);
StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder("\n List of Public API's");
apis.getBody().fields().next().getValue();
Iterator<Entry<String, JsonNode>> it = apis.getBody().fields();
while (it.hasNext()) {
result.append("\n").append(it.next().getValue().asText());
}
log.info(result.toString());
}
}
Our second REST client is as bellow, which calls a REST endpoint and then displays all the repositories for user bootng in the console.
LoadGithubRepo
package com.bootng;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.springframework.boot.CommandLineRunner;
import org.springframework.boot.web.client.RestTemplateBuilder;
import org.springframework.core.annotation.Order;
import org.springframework.http.ResponseEntity;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
import org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonNode;
@Component
@Order(2)
public class LoadGithubRepo implements CommandLineRunner {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ResttemplateApplication.class);
@Override
public void run(String... args) throws Exception {
log.info("about to call LoadGithubRepo.run()");
RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplateBuilder().build();
ResponseEntity<JsonNode> repos = restTemplate
.getForEntity("https://api.github.com/users/bootng/repos", JsonNode.class);
int counter = 1;
StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder("\n List of Repositories");
if (repos.getBody().isArray()) {
for(JsonNode jsonNode : repos.getBody()) {
result.append("\n Repo ").append(counter++).append("::");
result.append(jsonNode.get("name").asText());
}
}
log.info(result.toString());
}
}
Notice that LoadGithubRepo is marked with annotation Order(2) and LoadAllGithubEndpoints is marked with annotation Order(1). That means Spring will execute LoadAllGithubEndpoints first and then LoadGithubRepo.
Building and Running the application
mvn clean install
mvn spring-boot:run
Console Output
20-June-18 16:25:17:627 INFO main c.b.ResttemplateApplication:27 - about to call LoadAllEndpoint.run()
20-June-18 16:25:18:570 INFO main c.b.ResttemplateApplication:40 -
List of Public API's
https://api.github.com/user
https://github.com/settings/connections/applications{/client_id}
https://api.github.com/authorizations
https://api.github.com/search/code?q={query}{&page,per_page,sort,order}
https://api.github.com/search/commits?q={query}{&page,per_page,sort,order}
https://api.github.com/user/emails
https://api.github.com/emojis
https://api.github.com/events
https://api.github.com/feeds
https://api.github.com/user/followers
https://api.github.com/user/following{/target}
https://api.github.com/gists{/gist_id}
https://api.github.com/hub
https://api.github.com/search/issues?q={query}{&page,per_page,sort,order}
https://api.github.com/issues
https://api.github.com/user/keys
https://api.github.com/search/labels?q={query}&repository_id={repository_id}{&page,per_page}
https://api.github.com/notifications
https://api.github.com/orgs/{org}
https://api.github.com/orgs/{org}/repos{?type,page,per_page,sort}
https://api.github.com/orgs/{org}/teams
https://api.github.com/gists/public
https://api.github.com/rate_limit
https://api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}
https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q={query}{&page,per_page,sort,order}
https://api.github.com/user/repos{?type,page,per_page,sort}
https://api.github.com/user/starred{/owner}{/repo}
https://api.github.com/gists/starred
https://api.github.com/users/{user}
https://api.github.com/user/orgs
https://api.github.com/users/{user}/repos{?type,page,per_page,sort}
https://api.github.com/search/users?q={query}{&page,per_page,sort,order}
20-June-18 16:25:18:570 INFO main c.b.ResttemplateApplication:21 - about to call LoadGithubRepo.run()
20-June-18 16:25:19:069 INFO main c.b.ResttemplateApplication:36 -
List of Repositories
Repo 1::angular-word-merger
Repo 2::hansini-static-deploy
Repo 3::JUnit5-examples
Repo 4::okhttp
Repo 5::spring-boot-web-start
Repo 6::springboot_docker
20-June-18 16:25:19:071 INFO main c.b.ResttemplateApplication:57 - Started ResttemplateApplication in 3.382 seconds (JVM running for 6.625)
20-June-18 16:25:19:071 INFO main c.b.ResttemplateApplication:17 - completed executing ResttemplateApplication.run()
ControllerAdvice is an annotation provided by Spring. It is used to manage Exception handling in a Spring application. It allows us to handle any exception from any Classes in the Application and not just a single Class or one method. This article explains the advantages of using ControllerAdvice and some important points to be considered while using it.
ControllerAdvice is an annotation provided by Spring. It is used to manage Exception handling in a Spring application. It allows us to handle any exception from any Classes in the Application and not just a single Class or one method. This article explains the advantages of using ControllerAdvice and some important points to be considered while using it.
In this article, we will walk through a few examples to demonstrate the functionality of ControllerAdvice annotation. To start will we will use the Spring Boot Rest application. This application has many endpoints specifically to drive a blog backed which can serve APIs for CRUD operations on Blog, Tags, Categories, etc.
Let's examine the following endpoints from the application which allows us to retrieve a specific Blog or Comments by its id.
Example REST API
GET /blogapi/blogs/:Blog_ID
GET /blogapi/comments/:Comments_ID
GET /blogapi/categories/:CAT_ID
All these endpoints return the respective Objects if they exist with the specified ID or throws NotFoundException. If we think about any other Resource that has a GET endpoint will have a similar use case, that is throwing NotFoundException if Object is not found with the specified id.
So basically for any Resource Controller will need to deal with common exceptions that can occur while invoking the API. ControllerAdvice helps in handling all these exceptions from all the controllers globally in a separate class.
We will see the implementation of a Blog controller without Controlleradvice and with Controlleradvice
Let's see the Controller for the GET /blogs/id endpoint without Controlleradvice.
Example 1
Controller for Blog
This controller method implements the GET blog by id. The controller uses BlogService to get the BlogStory object with the specified id. If the service can't find any blog with the specified id, it throws NotFoundException. In the controller, we catch that exception and return ResponseEntity with HTTP Status Not Found. The service can also throw AppExceptions which is also needed to be handled at the controller.
Nothing is wrong with this controller but, we are doing the same kind of stuff probably in all the controller methods, that are handling NotFoundException or AppException. For instance think about the implementations of other endpoints GET /categories/id and GET /comments/id.
That's where ControllerAdvice comes into the picture.
We will create a Global Exception handing class that can handle the specific type of Exceptions for example in our case it is NotFoundException. We mark the class with @ControllerAdvice so that Spring can apply the exception handling implemented in this class globally to all the controllers in this application.
In this ControllerAdvice implementations, we are handing two exceptions, NotFoundException and AppException. If you see the source code in git, this ControllerAdvice has actually more methods to handle more Exceptions, but here we are just showing handling just these two Exceptions.
Now let us write the same controller taking advantage of the Global Exception Handler class we defined above. Now we don't have to catch the exception in our controller, we can simply work with the core business logic and delegate the exception handling to the Global Exception Handler Class.
For the end-user both the controller works exactly the same. But the implementation is different with regards to handling exceptions. If we have a ControllerAdvice and any of the controllers throws exception handled by ControllerAdvice then, Spring will invoke the respective method from the ControllerAdvice to handle the exception
Summary
The @ControllerAdvice annotation was first introduced in Spring 3.2
We can have a single or multiple controller advice class per application. Having a single controller advice class is recommended per application.
ControllerAdvice should contain methods to handle specific errors in the application.
Using ControllerAdvice results in more clean and maintainable codes.
We can handle both custom Exceptions as well as Spring Exceptions like HttpMediaTypeNotSupportedException, HttpRequestMethodNotSupportedException etc.
If we are writing Spring Controller and want to get access to the request payload and convert it to the domain model. Then we have different ways of handling the request payload. For instance, we can use @RequestBody to convert the incoming payload to a domain object, or to a String, etc.
In this article, we will see how we can use ObjectMapper to process incoming payload in s Spring Controller.
If we are writing Spring Controller and want to get access to the request payload and convert it to the domain model. Then we have different ways of handling the request payload. For instance, we can use @RequestBody to convert the incoming payload to a domain object, or to a String, etc.
In this article, we will see how we can use ObjectMapper to process incoming payload in s Spring Controller.
In this article, we will show a controller that accepts a JSON payload and then uses ObjectMapper to create instance of a domain object and then pass it to the service layer to persist it.
Example
BlogController with addBlogStory method.
Here we are reading the JSON input and converting it to a BlogStory Object. We are using ObjectMapper to convert the input JSON to a JsonNode object first. And then we are reading individual attributes from the JsonNode object and setting the corresponding field in our domain object.
@RestController
@RequestMapping("/blogapi")
public class BlogAPIController {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(BlogAPIController.class);
@Autowired
BlogService blogService;
@RequestMapping(value = {"/blogs"}, method = RequestMethod.POST,
produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
public Object addBlogStory(@RequestBody String input) {
log.info("inside blog POST method" + input);
ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
BlogStory newStory = new BlogStory();
try {
JsonNode jsonNode = mapper.readTree(input);
if (jsonNode.get("id") != null) {
newStory.setId(jsonNode.get("id").asText());
}
if (jsonNode.get("name") != null) {
newStory.setName(jsonNode.get("name").asText());
}
if (jsonNode.get("category") != null) {
newStory.setCategory(jsonNode.get("category").asText());
}
else {
newStory.setCategory("Finance");
}
if (jsonNode.get("summary") != null) {
newStory.setSummary(jsonNode.get("summary").asText());
}
if (jsonNode.get("description") != null) {
newStory.setDescription(jsonNode.get("description").asText());
}
blogService.addStory(newStory);
} catch (Exception e) {
log.error(e.getMessage());
}
ResponseEntity apiResponse = new ResponseEntity(newStory, HttpStatus.OK);
return apiResponse;
}
}
Notice that we have access to the JsonNode object, which we got from the mapper after reading the JSON payload. Now we can set custom logic. For instance if the category is null in the request payload we are setting default category "Finance"
Below is a sample JSON payload which will be acceptable by the above controller.
JSON Payload
{
"id": "Java_15",
"name": "Java 15",
"summary": "Java 15 Blog Summary",
"description": "Java 15 BlogLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit",
"category": "Technical"
}
Invoking the API
curl -X POST \
http://localhost:8080/blogapi/blogs \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
"id": "Java_15",
"name": "Java 15",
"summary": "Java 15 Blog Summary",
"description": "Java 15 BlogLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit",
"category": "Technical"
}'
Please find the repository link and build instruction as follows.
Using ObjectMapper to serialize JSON and then convert to a domain object gives more control. We then have access to the full JSON object and as we like we can populate the domain object after applying some transformation logic etc.
Spring RequestBody and ResponseBody annotations are used in Spring controllers, where we want to bind web requests to method parameters (RequestBody) or method return value (ResponseBody) to Web response. In this article, we will cover some quick examples of using both these annotations. Although Spring supports different styles of writing controller and accessing request, response object, using RequestBody and ResponseBody helps writing code quickly as all the parameters are already available in the controller, and Spring takes care of serialization and deserialization. Although using ResponseBody is not required if we use @RestController annotation. More about @Restcontroller can be found here @RestController
Spring RequestBody and ResponseBody annotations are used in Spring controllers, where we want to bind web requests to method parameters (RequestBody) or method return value (ResponseBody) to Web response. In this article, we will cover some quick examples of using both these annotations. Although Spring supports different styles of writing controller and accessing request, response object, using RequestBody and ResponseBody helps writing code quickly as all the parameters are already available in the controller, and Spring takes care of serialization and deserialization. Although using ResponseBody is not required if we use @RestController annotation. More about @Restcontroller can be found here @RestController
Serialization
Data sent over HTTP to server resources (Like a REST Controller) needs to be converted from serialized version to Objects. We can have different types of REST controllers based on the payload they support. For instance, we can design the REST controller to accept/send XML, JSON, TEXT, or HTML payloads/response. The Controller then should be able to read those data acts on it and return the response.
Spring uses HTTP Message converters to convert the HTTP request body into domain object [deserialize request body to domain object], and to convert Domain object back to HTTP response body while returning the response.
Spring provides a number of MessageConvertes like bellow,
StringHttpMessageConverter: Read Write String
FormHttpMessageConverter: Read Write HTTP Form Data
MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter: Read Write JSON
MappingJackson2XmlHttpMessageConverter: Read Write XML etc.
@RequestBody and @ResponseBody body annotation behind the scene uses these Message converter to serialize or deserialize the data.
Following section, we will see each example of these two annotations.
@RequestBody annotations
Typically in each controller, we can have multiple methods. Each method is tied to a specific HTTP request path via @RequestMapping. That's how Spring knows for an incoming request which method needs to be invoked.
If a method parameter is annotated with @RequestBody, Spring will bind the incoming HTTP request body (payload) to the parameter of the respective method tied to the request path. While doing that, Spring will [behind the scenes] use HTTP Message converters to convert the HTTP request body into domain object [deserialize request body to domain object], based on Accept header present in the request.
@ResponseBody Annotation
Similar to the @RequestBody annotation the @ResponseBody annotation is used to convert the return type of the method to the HTTP response. Here also Spring will use Message Converter to convert the return type of the method to the HTTP response body, set the HTTP headers, and HTTP status.
Let's see an example, where we bind a JSON payload to a @RequestBody method parameter.
Following the example, we will create a REST endpoint that can take a JSON payload to create a blog category object and then return the response back to the client.
Our BlogCategory Model
The model object representing a blog category.
public class BlogCategory {
private String id;
private String name;
//Getters and Setters removed for readability
}
Sample JSON Payload
This JSON payload can be used to populate the BlogCategory object.
{
"id": "new_cat",
"name": "new cat neme"
}
A controller method to add a new category.
In the following example, we mark the method parameters "input" with @RequestBody.
We also mark the return type of the method ResponseEntity with @ResponseBody.
As a result, when the controller receives a request, the payload will be parsed and used to populate an instance of the BlogCategory object.
Similarly when returning Web response back to client Spring will serialize the instance of and ResponseEntity to Web response.
Invoke API with Curl
We can invoke the API with payload by running the following curl command from a Terminal.
curl -X POST \
http://localhost:8080/blogapi/categories \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
"id": "new_cat",
"name": "new cat neme"
}'
API Response
The API should return with the following JSON payload.
{
"id": "new_cat",
"name": "new cat neme"
}
Summary
@RequestBody annotation facilitates deserialize the payload to a domain object.
@ResponseBody annotation facilitates serialization of the domain object to the payload.
@ResponseBody annotation is not required if we use @RestController rather then @Controller to annotate our Controller class.
@RestController is recommended over using @ResponseBody.
Another option is to use ResponseEntity as a return type of the controller method.
ResponseEntity class is used to represent HTTP response containing body, header and status.
ResponseEntity class extends HttpEntity and used to encapsulate HTTP response. While writing the REST controller one of the common design questions is what should the controller method return?
Also, we need to be cognizant about different REST endpoints and making sure all the responses maintain a standard pattern. All responses share common response building blocks like HTTP headers and HTTP Status. Using ResponseEntity is one of the options to write a REST controller, which helps in setting headers and status easily. ResponseEntity is not the only option we have while creating REST controllers. But It does provide some advantages
In this short article, we will see the different ways of writing REST Controller and returning data from the controller.
How to handing serialize the data from the controller depends on the use case we are dealing with. But we should keep in mind about easy maintenance of code and maintaining request-response structure across different endpoints.
ResponseEntity class is used to represent HTTP response containing body, header and status.
ResponseEntity class extends HttpEntity and used to encapsulate HTTP response. While writing the REST controller one of the common design questions is what should the controller method return?
Also, we need to be cognizant about different REST endpoints and making sure all the responses maintain a standard pattern. All responses share common response building blocks like HTTP headers and HTTP Status. Using ResponseEntity is one of the options to write a REST controller, which helps in setting headers and status easily. ResponseEntity is not the only option we have while creating REST controllers. But It does provide some advantages
In this short article, we will see the different ways of writing REST Controller and returning data from the controller.
How to handing serialize the data from the controller depends on the use case we are dealing with. But we should keep in mind about easy maintenance of code and maintaining request-response structure across different endpoints.
Using ResponseEntity is not only option to manipulate the response, but We can also return directly any Java object from the controller and let Spring do the serialization (Our Second example in this article).
For setting the HTTP status only we can use @ResponseStatus annotation.
For setting headers and status we can also javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse directly.
ResponseEntity Class
ResponseEntity Class is used to represent whole HTTP responses. It supports the
the message body, headers, status, etc. Internally Response extends org.springframework.http.HttpEntity
The advantage of using ResponseEntity is that it is easy to set headers status on this object directly which gets serialized as an HTTP response.
Let's see an example controller using ResponseEntity
Examples
Example 1: Controller with ResponseEntity
In this example, we are building a controller that returns a list of Tags as a response. Each tag is represented by a String object, so we are returning basically List
We are wrapping a list of tags received form service in ResponseEntity> object.
We can then set the HTTP status on the ResponseEntity object. If everything looks good, we are setting the status "OK 200", else we are setting HTTP status " 500 Internal Server Error".
Following is a controller that also does the same stuff as the above controller. That is the return list of Tags. But here we are not using ResponseEntity, rather we are sending the Object directly from the controller method
Let's see the example.
Example 2: Controller without ResponseEntity
Following controller which returns the list of Tags as a JSON response. Notice that the method returns List and not ResponseEntity.
Response from both the above API / v3/tags and /v1/tags looks the same.
Example 3
In this example, we are writing the controller with HttpServletResponse as a parameter. This allows us to set the header and status directly on the object.
We saw how to write a REST controller using ResponseEntity and without using ResponseEntity.
ResponseEntity makes it easy to set common HTTP Response elements like status code, headers, etc.
ResponseEntity is definitely useful but makes the overall controller method less readable the controller method return type is now ResponseEntity wrapped actual return type.
REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. In this article, we will walk through a sample REST application built using Spring Boot. This application does not use any database to store data, all the data is in memory. We will expose a few REST endpoints. Main purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to build REST API's using Spring boot.
REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. In this article, we will walk through a sample REST application built using Spring Boot. This application does not use any database to store data, all the data is in memory. We will expose a few REST endpoints. Main purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to build REST API's using Spring boot.
Application Details
This application is about building a backend for a Blog software and exposing two REST API endpoints. Following two endpoints both returns response in JSON format.
/blogapi/blogs : Returns list of blogs
/blogapi/blogs/ID : Returns details of a specific blog
BlogStory model class which represent a blog entry.
package com.bootng.model;
public class BlogStory {
private String id;
private String name;
private String summary;
private String description;
private String category;
public BlogStory() {
}
public BlogStory (String name, String category, String summary) {
this.id = name.replaceAll(" ","_");
this.name = name;
this.summary = summary;
this.category = category;
this.description = summary + "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt "
+ "ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. "
+ "Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat."
+ " Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum "
+ "dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, "
+ "sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum" ;
}
// Setters
}
BlogService Class
Service class which returns list of available blogs. Blog with an id etc.
@Service
public class BlogService {
List category = Arrays.asList("Technical", "Travel", "Food", "Finance", "Entertainment");
List stories = new ArrayList();
{
stories.add(new BlogStory("Java 11", "Technical", "Java 11 Blog"));
stories.add(new BlogStory("Java 14", "Technical", "Java 14 Blog"));
stories.add(new BlogStory("Asia Travel", "Travel", "Places to visit in Asia"));
stories.add(new BlogStory("Europe Travel", "Travel", "Places to visit in Europe"));
stories.add(new BlogStory("Japan Travel", "Travel", "Places to visit in Japan"));
stories.add(new BlogStory("Asian Food", "Food", "Asian Food......"));
}
public BlogStory getBlogStory(String id) throws AppException {
return stories.stream().filter(story -> id.equals(story.getId())).findAny().orElse(null);
}
public List getBlogStory() throws AppException {
return stories;
}
public void addStory(BlogStory newStory) throws AppException {
this.stories.add(newStory);
}
public List getBlogTags() throws AppException {
return category;
}
}
Main Application Class
Spring Boot's main application class.
@ComponentScan({"com.bootng"})
@SpringBootApplication
public class RestApplication {
public static void main(String args[]) {
SpringApplication.run(RestApplication.class, args);
}
}
BlogAPIController Controller Class
Controller class which exposes the two endpoints
GET /blogapi/blogs and
GET /blogapi/blogs/ID
@Controller annotation is used to mark this class as a Controller.
@RequestMapping is used to map the request paths "/blogs" to getBlogSotries method
and /blog/ID to getBlogStory method.
In both cases we are mapping both the paths to HTTP GET verb by using method = RequestMethod.GET
@ResponseBody is used to convert the result to JSON (as we specified by produces=MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
@Controller
@RequestMapping("/blogapi")
public class BlogAPIController {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(BlogAPIController.class);
@Autowired
BlogService blogService;
ResponseEntity apiResponse = new ResponseEntity(newStory, HttpStatus.OK);
return apiResponse;
}
@RequestMapping(value = {"/blogs"}, method = RequestMethod.GET,
produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
public @ResponseBody ResponseEntity> getBlogStories() {
log.info("inside getBlogStories GET method");
List blogStory = null;
ResponseEntity> apiResponse;
try {
blogStory = blogService.getBlogStory();
apiResponse = new ResponseEntity>(blogStory, HttpStatus.OK);
} catch (AppException e) {
apiResponse =
new ResponseEntity>(blogStory, HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
e.printStackTrace();
}
return apiResponse;
}
@RequestMapping(value = {"/blogs"}, method = RequestMethod.GET,
produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
public @ResponseBody ResponseEntity getBlogStory(@PathParam(value = "") String id) {
log.info("inside blog GET method");
BlogStory blogStory = null;
ResponseEntity apiResponse;
try {
blogStory = blogService.getBlogStory(id);
if (blogStory == null)
apiResponse = new ResponseEntity(blogStory, HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND);
else
apiResponse = new ResponseEntity(blogStory, HttpStatus.OK);
} catch (AppException e) {
apiResponse = new ResponseEntity(blogStory, HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
e.printStackTrace();
}
return apiResponse;
}
}
Start Application
Run Application
Build the project using mvn clean install and then run it with mvn spring-boot:run
mvn clean install
mvn spring-boot:run
Call REST API's using CURL
CURL: Get list of Blogs
Using curl we can get list of blogs from the /blogs endpoint
curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/blogapi/blogs
CURL: Get specific blog details
Get a specific blog with id "Java_14" by calling /blogs/Java_14
In this article, we used Springs RestController annotation to build the API.
With Spring boot we can use other frameworks like Jersey, Restlet, etc also to build API.
Spring 4 introduced a new annotation called RestController. It makes writing REST controllers a little easy as we don't have to repeat the @ResponseBody annotations in each and every controller method. In this short article, we will examine how to write the REST API controller using both the annotations.
While writing the REST controller it is recommended to use @RestController rather then @Controller.
Spring 4 introduced a new annotation called RestController. It makes writing REST controllers a little easy as we don't have to repeat the @ResponseBody annotations in each and every controller method. In this short article, we will examine how to write the REST API controller using both the annotations.
While writing the REST controller it is recommended to use @RestController rather then @Controller.
@Controller Example
Controller annotation is a classic annotation which marks a Class as a controller and helps Spring to autodetect these Classes though Class scanning. While developing REST API in Spring Boot, we can mark a Class as Controller. We then need to use the @ResponseBody annotation to be used so that whatever the method returns can be serialized.
In this article, we will go through two examples a simple Controller which returns a list of categories and tags as JSON response respectively using both these annotations.
Let's see an example with Controller annotation.
CategoryController controller contains a method "getBlogCats" that returns a list of categories, it is mapped to the request path "/blogapi/categories".
Here we are using @Controller annotation to mark this class as Controller.
We need to use @ResponseBody annotation in the method getBlogCats so that List can be serialized and sent back to the client as Web response.
CategoryController Class
@Controller
@RequestMapping("/blogapi")
public class CategoryController {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(CategoryController.class);
@Autowired
BlogService blogService;
@RequestMapping(value = {"/categories"}, method = RequestMethod.GET,
produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
public @ResponseBody ResponseEntity<List<String>> getBlogCats() {
ResponseEntity<List<String>> apiResponse;
try {
List<String> categories = blogService.getBlogCategories();
apiResponse = new ResponseEntity<List<String>>(categories, HttpStatus.OK);
} catch (AppException e) {
apiResponse = new ResponseEntity<List<String>>(HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
log.error(e.getMessage());
}
return apiResponse;
}
}
Next we will see a REST controller with @RestController. This Controller creates a GET REST endpoint that returns a list of Tags. It can be accessed as GET /blogapi/tags. The method getBlogTags() returns ResponseEntity>. Since we are marking the Class with @RestController, Spring will serialize the return type to HTTP response body and return to the client. Notice that we don't need to use @ResponseBody annotation.
@RestController Example
TagAPIController.Java
@RestController
@RequestMapping("/blogapi")
public class TagAPIController {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(TagAPIController.class);
@Autowired
BlogService blogService;
@RequestMapping(value = {"/tags"}, method = RequestMethod.GET,
produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
public ResponseEntity getBlogTags() {
ResponseEntity<List<String>> apiResponse;
try {
List<String> tags = blogService.getBlogTags();
apiResponse = new ResponseEntity<List<String>>(tags, HttpStatus.OK);
} catch (AppException e) {
apiResponse = new ResponseEntity<List<String>>(HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
log.error(e.getMessage());
}
return apiResponse;
}
}
In this example since we marked the controller with @RestController , we don't need to mark getBlogTags with @ResponseBody explicitly.
Summary
@RestController is available from Spring 4.0 onwards.
@RestController is a composed annotation containing both @Controller and @ResponseBody annotations.
While writing REST controller it is better to use @RestController.
In this article, we have seen two different Controllers one using @Controller and another using @RestController.
Spring boot application while starting shows a number of useful information in the console. Generally, the console output will start with a spring boot banner. Like one bellow. In this article we will cover how to change the default banner and turning it on or off etc.
Spring boot application while starting shows a number of useful information in the console. Generally, the console output will start with a spring boot banner. Like one bellow. In this article we will cover how to change the default banner and turning it on or off etc.
We can turn off the banner by configuration changes or by java code change. Following section shows how to turn of the banner in both ways.
application.properties
The banner can be turned off by setting spring.main.banner-mode to off in application.properties file
spring.main.banner-mode=off
The following code demonstrates how we can set the banner mode off though java code in the Main application file.
Main Application Class
@SpringBootApplication
public class HelloApplication implements CommandLineRunner {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(HelloApplication.class);
public static void main(String[] args) {
var app = new SpringApplication(HelloApplication.class);
app.setBannerMode(Banner.Mode.OFF);
app.run(args);
}
@Autowired
HelloService service;
@Override
public void run(String... args) throws Exception {
log.info(service.hello());
}
}
Changing the banner
We can change the banner by providing ASCII banner contents in a file and specifying the file location in application.properties.
spring.banner.location points to the banner file.
We can also specify additional properties in the banner.txt file. For instance, in the following example, we are specifying application.title, application.version, etc. to be displayed under the banner "bootng"
Code Details
my-banner.txt
ASCII banner content. We are using SpringBoot constants AnsiColor.RED to specify the color of the banner text.