Hi,
Since Victor got an answer for best practices for JAX-RS paging, I'll give it a shot too with different problem. :-)
Objects serialized and returned by JAX-RS services may be complex and have lots of nested objects, thus an XML serialized list of just a few objects can weight tens or hundreds of kb's. Some clients, like a web AJAX application with large screen estate, may find all of this data useful and have no problem with even large file transfers, whereas other clients, such as a mobile application, might prefer getting only a subset of data per object that it can quickly (and cheaply) download and fit on its limited screen and then get the details for a particular object when needed via a subsequent JAX-RS request. It feels a bit cludgy to implement separate JAX-RS services for example for the AJAX and the mobile application, one that would return the full object trees and one that would only return limited versions of the objects. Does anybody have any ideas how one should make the object serialization customizable by the client with JAX-RS while using the same service and same source objects? Perhaps the client should define required object properties in the request and these should be passed to the JAXB binding process somehow in the service?
Example:
Let's say we have a JAX-RS service /employees/ that returns a list of all employees for a company. An example of returned document in XML format:
<employees>
<employee>
<id>123</id>
<firstName>John</firstName>
<lastName>Doe</lastName>
<address>
<street>Abc 123</street>
<city>New York</city>
<zip>12345</<zip>
</address>
<department>
<id>123</id>
<name>Marketing</name>
<parentDepartment>
<id>234</id>
<name>Corporate Services</name>
<parentDepartment>
<id>345</id>
<name>Acme Ltd.</name>
</parentDepartment>
</parentDepartment>
<department>
</employee>
<employee>
<id>234</id>
..
</employee>
..
..
..
<employees>
The example AJAX application client prefers this full object serialization, but the limited mobile client would prefer only getting the employee id's and names to populate a list, and when required (i.e. user selects an employee on the list), it would then call /employee/{id} to get the details for a particular employee:
<employees>
<employee>
<id>123</id>
<firstName>John</firstName>
<lastName>Doe</lastName>
</employee>
<employee>
<id>234</id>
..
</employee>
..
..
..
<employees>
Thanks,
Janne