JavaXmlRequests - Hocdoc/Play20 GitHub Wiki
An XML request is an HTTP request using a valid XML payload as request body. It must specify the text/xml MIME type in its Content-Type header.
By default, an action uses an any content body parser, which you can use to retrieve the body as XML (actually as a org.w3c.Document):
public static Result sayHello() {
Document dom = request().body().asXml();
if(dom == null) {
return badRequest("Expecting Xml data");
} else {
String name = XPath.selectText("//name", dom);
if(name == null) {
return badRequest("Missing parameter [name]");
} else {
return ok("Hello " + name);
}
}
}
Of course it’s way better (and simpler) to specify our own BodyParser to ask Play to parse the content body directly as XML:
@BodyParser.Of(Xml.class)
public static Result sayHello() {
Document dom = request().body().asXml();
if(dom == null) {
return badRequest("Expecting Xml data");
} else {
String name = XPath.selectText("//name", dom);
if(name == null) {
return badRequest("Missing parameter [name]");
} else {
return ok("Hello " + name);
}
}
}
Note: This way, a 400 HTTP response will be automatically returned for non-XML requests.
You can test it with cURL on the command line:
curl
--header "Content-type: text/xml"
--request POST
--data '<name>Guillaume</name>'
http://localhost:9000/sayHello
It replies with:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 15
Hello Guillaume
In our previous example, we handled an XML request, but replied with a text/plain response. Let’s change it to send back a valid XML HTTP response:
@BodyParser.Of(Xml.class)
public static Result sayHello() {
Document dom = request().body().asXml();
if(dom == null) {
return badRequest("Expecting Xml data");
} else {
String name = XPath.selectText("//name", dom);
if(name == null) {
return badRequest("<message \"status\"=\"KO\">Missing parameter [name]</message>");
} else {
return ok("<message \"status\"=\"OK\">Hello " + name + "</message>");
}
}
}
Now it replies with:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 46
<message status="OK">Hello Guillaume</message>
Next: Handling file upload