Handling Form Posts

The best way to handle a form post is usually by using an input bean. The following is a class that takes in URL-Encoded form post of the form "aString=foo&aNumber=123&aDate=2001-07-04T15:30:45Z".

@RestResource( path="/urlEncodedForm" ) public class UrlEncodedFormResource extends BasicRestServlet { /** POST request handler */ @RestMethod(name=POST, path="/") public Object doPost(@Body FormInputBean input) throws Exception { // Just mirror back the request return input; } public static class FormInputBean { public String aString; public int aNumber; @BeanProperty(pojoSwaps=CalendarSwap.ISO8601DT.class) public Calendar aDate; } }

Another possibility is to access the form parameters individually:

/** POST request handler */ @RestMethod(name=POST, path="/") public Object doPost(@FormData("aString") String aString, @FormData("aNumber") int aNumber, @FormData("aDate") Calendar aDate) throws Exception { ... }

The advantage to the form input bean is that it can handle any of the parsable types (e.g. JSON, XML...) in addition to URL-Encoding. The latter approach only supports URL-Encoding.