When we set up our MVC controller classes, we put the @Controller annotation at the class level, which tells the environment that the entire class is dedicated to running the UI. However, we don't necessarily always want to do that - JAX-RS is the way to build REST APIs, after all, and so we should also add JSON versions of our Person methods.

Person Model Modification

Before we get to the meat of the code, go back to the Person class and modify it to remove the parameter to the @Id annotation and switch it to a String type:

package model;

import javax.validation.constraints.Email;
import javax.validation.constraints.NotBlank;
import javax.ws.rs.FormParam;

import org.jnosql.artemis.Column;
import org.jnosql.artemis.Entity;
import org.jnosql.artemis.Id;

@Entity
public class Person {
	@Id
	private String id;
	@Column @FormParam("name") @NotBlank
	private String name;
	@Column @FormParam("emailAddress") @NotBlank @Email
	private String emailAddress;
	
	public String getId() { return id; }
	public void setId(String id) { this.id = id; }
	public String getName() { return name; }
	public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; }
	public String getEmailAddress() { return emailAddress; }
	public void setEmailAddress(String emailAddress) { this.emailAddress = emailAddress; }
}

The reason for the change is that my original example was based on code from an older version of JNoSQL, and long IDs end up causing trouble when updating existing documents.

Also go to PersonRepository and modify it to use a String for the key:

package model;

import java.util.List;

import org.jnosql.artemis.Repository;

public interface PersonRepository extends Repository<Person, String> {
	List<Person> findAll();
}

 

Tweaking the Controller

The first step to adding in API methods doing this is to move the @Controller annotation down to just the methods that emit JSP responses (and adjust for the changed ID field while we're here):

package com.example;

import java.util.Random;

import javax.enterprise.context.RequestScoped;
import javax.inject.Inject;
import javax.mvc.Controller;
import javax.mvc.Models;
import javax.validation.Valid;
import javax.ws.rs.BeanParam;
import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.POST;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;

import org.bson.types.ObjectId;
import org.jnosql.artemis.Database;
import org.jnosql.artemis.DatabaseType;

import model.Person;
import model.PersonRepository;

@Path("/people")
@RequestScoped
public class PersonController {
	@Inject
	Models models;
	
	@Inject
	@Database(DatabaseType.DOCUMENT)
	PersonRepository personRepository;
	
	@GET
	@Controller
	public String home() {
		models.put("people", personRepository.findAll()); //$NON-NLS-1$
		return "person-new.jsp"; //$NON-NLS-1$
	}
	
	@POST
	@Controller
	public String createPerson(@BeanParam @Valid Person person) {
		if(person.getId() == null || person.getId().isEmpty()) {
			person.setId(new ObjectId().toHexString());
		}
		
		models.put("person", personRepository.save(person)); //$NON-NLS-1$
		models.put("people", personRepository.findAll()); //$NON-NLS-1$
		return "person-created.jsp"; //$NON-NLS-1$
	}
}

Doing this shouldn't change the behavior of the app, and that's what we want.

Add Some API methods

Now, to be a proper REST API, we'll want a suite of Create-Read-Update-Delete methods using standard HTTP verbs. Add these methods to the class:

@GET
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public List<Person> list() {
  return personRepository.findAll();
}

@GET
@Path("{id}")
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public Person getPerson(@PathParam("id") String id) {
  return personRepository.findById(id).orElseThrow(() -> new javax.ws.rs.NotFoundException("Could not find person for ID " + id)); //$NON-NLS-1$
}

@POST
@Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public Person createPersonApi(@Valid Person person) {
  if(person.getId() == null) {
    person.setId(new ObjectId().toHexString());
  }
  return personRepository.save(person);
}

@DELETE
@Path("{id}")
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public JsonObject deletePersonApi(@PathParam("id") String id) {
  personRepository.findById(id).orElseThrow(() -> new javax.ws.rs.NotFoundException("Could not find person for ID " + id)); //$NON-NLS-1$
  personRepository.deleteById(id);
  return Json.createObjectBuilder()
      .add("success", true) //$NON-NLS-1$
      .build();
}

@PUT
@Path("{id}")
@Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public Person updatePersonApi(@PathParam("id") String id, @Valid Person person) {
  person.setId(id);
  return personRepository.save(person);
}

Here, we're taking advantage of JAX-RS's MIME-type-based routing: because our @Controller methods deal with HTML but these new methods declare that they're working with JSON, JAX-RS will route incoming browser visits to the controller and incoming API requests to the others.

Testing It Out

We can see this in action by trying out the API from the command line (or with a REST client app like Postman):

$ curl -i http://localhost:9091/javaeetutorial/resources/people
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: Servlet/4.0
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2019 17:05:16 GMT
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Length: 246

[{"emailAddress":"api@test.com","id":"5c683fd40048ce11b5f6aee8","name":"API Test"},{"emailAddress":"foo@foo.com","id":"5c6841520048cea7c9f6c2d5","name":"Foo Fooson"},{"emailAddress":"foo@foo.com","id":"5c6841690048cea7c9f6c2d7","name":"API mod"}]

$ curl -i -X POST -H"Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:9091/javaeetutorial/resources/people -d "{\"emailAddress\":\"foo@foo.com\",\"name\":\"Created with cURL\"}"
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: Servlet/4.0
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2019 17:11:55 GMT
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Length: 89

{"emailAddress":"foo@foo.com","id":"5c68445b0048cea7c9402b85","name":"Created with cURL"}

$ curl -i -X PUT -H"Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:9091/javaeetutorial/resources/people/5c68445b0048cea7c9402b85 -d "{\"emailAddress\":\"foo_mod@foo.com\",\"name\":\"Modified with cURL\"}"
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: Servlet/4.0
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2019 17:12:30 GMT
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Length: 94

{"emailAddress":"foo_mod@foo.com","id":"5c68445b0048cea7c9402b85","name":"Modified with cURL"}

$ curl -i -X DELETE http://localhost:9091/javaeetutorial/resources/people/5c68445b0048cea7c9402b85
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: Servlet/4.0
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2019 17:12:54 GMT
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Length: 16

{"success":true}

OpenAPI Documentation

OpenAPI is the boring-ified name of the standardized spec of Swagger, a mechanism for documenting REST APIs - kind of like what WSDL is for SOAP web services. This spec has become an important part of MicroProfile, the set of Java server technologies geared towards writing microservices that shares a lot of core technologies with Java EE. One of the niceties that MicroProfile includes is an automatic OpenAPI generator for JAX-RS services. There are a few things to add to our environment to enable this, but not too much.

To begin with, we'll have to enable the OpenAPI generator feature in Open Liberty (TomEE may have something like this; I don't know). To do that, open up the "server.xml" file (labeled "Server Configuration" in Eclipse's Servers view) and add "mpOpenAPI-1.0" to the feature list:

<featureManager>
    <feature>javaee-8.0</feature>
    <feature>localConnector-1.0</feature>
    <feature>mpOpenAPI-1.0</feature>
</featureManager>

Doing that alone will enable the API documentation, available at http://localhost:9091/openapi. However, if you look closely at the output, you'll see it's not exactly what we'd want: the GET operation for /resources/people points to our MVC home method, which it considers an unstructured string. It also lists the "helloworld" and "markdown" resources, and you can feel free to delete those classes outright - we won't be returning to them.

To fix this, first go to the project's "pom.xml" and add a dependency on the MicroProfile OpenAPI spec:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.eclipse.microprofile.openapi</groupId>
    <artifactId>microprofile-openapi-api</artifactId>
    <version>1.1</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

This is another one we can mark as "provided" since the implementation is included with the server.

Now, go back to the PersonController class, add an import line for org.eclipse.microprofile.openapi.annotations.Operation, and annotate the two MVC methods to mark them hidden from OpenAPI:

@GET
@Controller
@Operation(hidden=true)
public String home() {
  models.put("people", personRepository.findAll()); //$NON-NLS-1$
  return "person-new.jsp"; //$NON-NLS-1$
}

@POST
@Controller
@Operation(hidden=true)
public String createPerson(@BeanParam @Valid Person person) {
  if(person.getId() == null) {
    person.setId(new ObjectId().toHexString());
  }
  personRepository.save(person);

  models.put("person", person); //$NON-NLS-1$
  models.put("people", personRepository.findAll()); //$NON-NLS-1$
  return "person-created.jsp"; //$NON-NLS-1$
}

Now, if you refresh the /openapi output, you can see that it switched to the list method, and it knows that it outputs JSON, and includes a reference to the Person object structure at the bottom of the file.

There's a good deal more you can do with these annotations to customize the output, but it's nice to know that you can get an immediately-useful file that could be used to generate structured client libraries "for free".

Next Steps

Next, I think we'll dive into the world of Java EE authentication, which will be a very-different experience from what we're used to with Domino, for better and for worse.