Retrieving resource id in Restlet

Question

what's the Restlet equivalent of the following snippet of code I'm using with Jersey:

  @GET
  @Path("{id}")
  @Produces({ MediaType.APPLICATION_XML, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON,MediaType.TEXT_XML})
  public Todo getEntityXMLOrJSON(@PathParam("id") int id)
  {
    ...
  }

I mean, when using Restlet framework I do the following:

public class ContactsApplication extends Application {
    public Restlet createInboundRoot() {
        Router router = new Router(getContext());
        router.attach("/contacts/{contactId}", ContactServerResource.class);
        return router;
    }
}

how do I retrieve contactId in the get method ?

Answer 1

If you define a path parameter when attaching a server resource, you can access its value within this server resource using the method getAttribute, as described below:

public class ContactServerResource extends ServerResource {
    @Get
    public Contact getContact() {
        String contactId = getAttribute("contactId");
        (...)
    }
}

You can notice that you can define such elements as instance variables. The following code is a typical implementation of a server resource ContactServerResource:

public class ContactServerResource extends ServerResource {
    private Contact contact;

    @Override
    protected void doInit() throws ResourceException {
        String contactId = getAttribute("contactId");
        // Load the contact from backend
        this.contact = (...)
        setExisting(this.contact != null);
    }

    @Get
    public Contact getContact() {
        return contact;
    }

    @Put
    public void updateContact(Contact contactToUpdate) {
       // Update the contact based on both contactToUpdate
       // and contact (that contains the contact id)
    }

    @Delete
    public void deleteContact() {
       // Delete the contact based on the variable "contact"
    }
}

Hope it helps you, Thierry