Jersey Client - How to send List in a form with a POST request

Question

I am using the jersey client to send POST requests to a web server. I have generally been building up a Form object with key-value pairs. However, I now have to send a List within my request. Here's an abridged version of my code

// Phone is a POJO consisting of a few Strings
public void request(List<Phone> phones) {
     Form form = new Form();
     form.add("phones", phones);
     ClientResponse response = WebService.getResponseFromServer(form);
     String output = response.getEntity(String.class);
     System.out.println(output);
}

public static ClientResponse getResponseFromServer(Form form) {
    Client client = createClient();
    WebResource webResource = client.resource(PATH);

    return webResource.type(MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED).post(ClientResponse.class, form);
}

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work, and I get a 400 bad request error. When I send a request directly

{"phones":[{"areaCode":"217","countryCode":"01","number":"3812565"}]}

I have no problems. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Given your example, based on typical POJO serialization, what you need isn't List<Phone> but a class with a member phones of a type List<Phone> , otherwise the payload will look like this:

[{"areaCode":"217","countryCode":"01","number":"3812565"}]

So first, what you need is a jersey client with JSON serialization feature. You need to include jersey-json (along with the jersey-client ) in your dependencies. Example in Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
    <artifactId>jersey-client</artifactId>
    <version>1.19</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
    <artifactId>jersey-json</artifactId>
    <version>1.19</version>
</dependency>

Create your client like this:

ClientConfig clientConfig = new DefaultClientConfig();
clientConfig.getFeatures().put(JSONConfiguration.FEATURE_POJO_MAPPING, Boolean.TRUE);
Client client = Client.create(clientConfig);

Assuming you have a variable phones which is the POJO, you can call this:

ClientResponse response = webResource.accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE).type(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE).post(ClientResponse.class, phones);