The Java EE 6 Tutorial, Volume I

The @Path Annotation and URI Path Templates

The @Path annotation identifies the URI path template to which the resource responds, and is specified at the class level of a resource. The @Path annotation's value is a partial URI path template relative to the base URI of the server on which the resource is deployed, the context root of the WAR, and the URL pattern to which the Jersey helper servlet responds.

URI path templates are URIs with variables embedded within the URI syntax. These variables are substituted at runtime in order for a resource to respond to a request based on the substituted URI. Variables are denoted by curly braces. For example, look at the following @Path annotation:

@Path("/users/{username}")

In this type of example, a user will be prompted to enter their name, and then a Jersey web service configured to respond to requests to this URI path template will respond. For example, if the user entered their user name as Galileo, the web service will respond to the following URL:

http://example.com/users/Galileo

To obtain the value of the username variable, the @PathParamannotation may be used on the method parameter of a request method, as shown in the following code example.

@Path("/users/{username}")
public class UserResource {

    @GET
    @Produces("text/xml")
    public String getUser(@PathParam("username") String userName) {
        ...
    }
}

If it is required that a user name must only consist of lower and upper case numeric characters, it is possible to declare a particular regular expression that will override the default regular expression, "[^/]+?". The following example shows how this could be used with the @Path annotation.

@Path("users/{username: [a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z_0-9]}")

In this type of example the username variable will only match user names that begin with one upper or lower case letter and zero or more alpha numeric characters and the underscore character. If a user name does not match that template, then a 404 (Not Found) response will occur.

An @Path value may or may not begin with a forward slash (/), it makes no difference. Likewise, by default, an @Path value may or may not end in a forward lash (/), it makes no difference, and thus request URLs that end or do not end with a forward slash will both be matched. However, Jersey has a redirection mechanism, which, if enabled, automatically performs redirection to a request URL ending in a / if a request URL does not end in a / and the matching @Path does end in a /.

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:


Note –

The value of the name3 variable is an empty string.


Table 13–2 Examples of URI path templates

URI Path Template 

URI After Substitution 

http://example.com/{name1}/{name2}/

http://example.com/jay/gatsby/

http://example.com/{question}/

{question}/{question}/

http://example.com/why/why/why/

http://example.com/maps/{location}

http://example.com/maps/Main%20Street

http://example.com/{name3}/home/

http://example.com//home/