The @Consumes Annotation

The @Consumes annotation is used to specify which MIME media types of representations a resource can accept, or consume, from the client. If @Consumes is applied at the class level, all the response methods accept the specified MIME types by default. If applied at the method level, @Consumes overrides any @Consumes annotations applied at the class level.

If a resource is unable to consume the MIME type of a client request, the JAX-RS runtime sends back an HTTP 415 (“Unsupported Media Type”) error.

The value of @Consumes is an array of String of acceptable MIME types. For example:

@Consumes({"text/plain,text/html"})

The following example shows how to apply @Consumes at both the class and method levels:

@Path("/myResource")
@Consumes("multipart/related")
public class SomeResource {
	@POST
	public String doPost(MimeMultipart mimeMultipartData) {
		...
	}

	@POST
	@Consumes("application/x-www-form-urlencoded")
	public String doPost2(FormURLEncodedProperties formData) {
		...
	}
}

The doPost method defaults to the MIME media type of the @Consumes annotation at the class level. The doPost2 method overrides the class level @Consumes annotation to specify that it can accept URL-encoded form data.

If no resource methods can respond to the requested MIME type, an HTTP 415 (“Unsupported Media Type”) error is returned to the client.

The HelloWorld example discussed previously in this section can be modified to set the message by using @Consumes, as shown in the following code example:

@POST
@Consumes("text/plain")
public void postClichedMessage(String message) {
    // Store the message
}

In this example, the Java method will consume representations identified by the MIME media type text/plain. Note that the resource method returns void. This means that no representation is returned and that a response with a status code of HTTP 204 (“No Content”) will be returned.