On Jun 15, 2008, at 1:04 AM, Victor Grazi wrote:
> Using the JAX-RS API, I am assuming there is a way to automatically
> transform custom objects to any of a number of supported output
> formats.
> But it is not clear to me how it is done or what the life cycle
> would be.
>
> For example, I would like to be able to create a method that returns
> a Java object (of a specified type @GET public MyClass
> someGetMethod() - no @ProduceMime specified), and depending on the
> Content-Type in the HTTP request, have a custom converter
> automatically invoked that would serialize that Java object to any
> of the Content-Types supported by my application (xml, plain text,
> etc), and automatically return the converted result in the response.
>
> This would allow me to create a single method that returns a Java
> type, and have that type automatically converted to the output
> format specified by the client, without having to create a method
> implementation for each Content-Type in the request.
>
> Of course I would expect the developer to create the transformation
> code for each return type and output format, I am just not clear on
> what the interfaces are, how to hook it in, and in general how (or
> if) it works.
>
> If this is possible, can anyone please point me to some code samples
> and/or explanation?
It is my understanding the JAX-RS doesn't address this. I'm convinced
that the best way to do this for XML is to use XStream. You can find a
quick tutorial I put together on XStream at
http://www.ociweb.com/mark/programming/XStream.html
.
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Mark Volkmann