More on URI Path Template Variables

A URI path template has one or more variables, with each variable name surrounded by curly braces, { to begin the variable name and } to end it. In the example above, username is the variable name. At runtime, a resource configured to respond to the above URI path template will attempt to process the URI data that corresponds to the location of {username} in the URI as the variable data for username.

For example, if you want to deploy a resource that responds to the URI path template http://example.com/myContextRoot/jerseybeans/{name1}/{name2}/, you must deploy the WAR to a Java EE server that responds to requests to the http://example.com/myContextRoot URI, and then decorate your resource with the following @Path annotation:

@Path("/{name1}/{name2}/")
public class SomeResource {
	...
}

In this example, the URL pattern for the Jersey helper servlet, specified in web.xml, is the default:

<servlet-mapping>
	  <servlet-name>My Jersey Bean Resource</servlet-name>
	  <url-pattern>/jerseybeans/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

A variable name can be used more than once in the URI path template.

If a character in the value of a variable would conflict with the reserved characters of a URI, the conflicting character should be substituted with percent encoding. For example, spaces in the value of a variable should be substituted with %20.

Be careful when defining URI path templates that the resulting URI after substitution is valid.

The following table lists some examples of URI path template variables and how the URIs are resolved after substitution. The following variable names and values are used in the examples:

• name1:jay

• name2: gatsby

• name3:

• location: Main%20Street

• question: why

The value of the name3 variable is an empty string.