How to pass generic List<User> to restful web services

Question

I have the requirement to create the search operation using restful web services, ie, using @GET. The method signature takes String and List as input argument and returns List.

public Generic List <Employer> getAllEmployer(String employeeName, Generic List <employeeLocation>);

Kindly request if someone could describe on how to implement the same. Should I use query param or path param or form param. I need to return the List of employer in json format.

Answer 1

if the employee locations are just string, pass them as comma seperated values and spring will take care of converting it to list. I would rather suggest just to have it as a pathparam rather than having it as a query param.

Answer 2

This is just my opinion but I think that the "RESTful" way to pass multiple parameters with the same name would be to a MultiValueMap.

Spring and Jersey both have implementations of MultiValueMap however, below is an example of a spring implementation:

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = {"/employer/_search"})
public List<Employer> search(@RequestParam MultiValueMap<String,String> params) {
    return someService.search(params);
}

They way that you would call this url would then become:

/employer/_search?employeeName=name&location=1&location=2&location=3

Then behind the scenes spring will create the MultiValueMap for you which is a Map<String,List<String>> where any parameters with the same name are put into the same list.