Thursday, May 23, 2013

Support for paging in the RHQ REST-api (updated)

I have just pushed some changes to RHQ master that implement paging for (most) of the REST-endpoints that return collections of data.



If you remember, I was asking the other day if there is a "standard" way to do this. Basically there are two
"big options":
  1. Put paging info in the Http-Header
  2. Put paging info in the body of the message


While I think paging information are meta data that should not "pollute" the body, I understand the arguments from the JavaScript side that says that they don't easily have access to the http headers
within AJAX requests. So what I have now done is to implement both:
  1. Paging in the http header: this is the standard way that you get if you just request the "normal" media types of application/xml or application/json (output from running RestAssured):

    [update]
    My colleague Libor pointed out that the links do not match with format from RFC 5988 Web Linking, which is now fixed.
    [/update]

    Request method: GET
    Request path: http://localhost:7080/rest/resource
    Query params: page=1
    ps=2
    category=service
    Headers: Content-Type=*/*
    Accept=application/json
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Server=Apache-Coyote/1.1
    Pragma=No-cache
    Cache-Control=no-cache
    Expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 CET
    Link=<http://localhost:7080/rest/resource?ps=2&category=service&page=2>; rel="next"
    Link=<http://localhost:7080/rest/resource?ps=2&category=service&page=0>; rel="prev"
    Link=<http://localhost:7080/rest/resource?ps=2&category=service&page=152>; rel="last"
    Link=<http://localhost:7080/rest/resource?page=1&ps=2&category=service>; rel="current"
    Content-Encoding=gzip
    X-collection-size=305
    Content-Type=application/json
    Transfer-Encoding=chunked
    Date=Thu, 23 May 2013 07:57:38 GMT

    [
    {
    "resourceName": "/",
    "resourceId": 10041,
    "typeName": "File System",
    "typeId": 10013,
    …..
  2. Paging as part of the body - there the "real collection" is wrapped inside an object that also contains paging meta data as well as the paging links. To request this representation, a media type of application/vnd.rhq.wrapped+json needs to be used (and this is only available with JSON at the moment):

    Request method: GET
    Request path: http://localhost:7080/rest/resource
    Query params: page=1
    ps=2
    category=service
    Headers: Content-Type=*/*
    Accept=application/vnd.rhq.wrapped+json
    Cookies:
    Body:
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Server=Apache-Coyote/1.1
    Pragma=No-cache
    Cache-Control=no-cache
    Expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 CET
    Content-Encoding=gzip
    Content-Type=application/vnd.rhq.wrapped+json
    Transfer-Encoding=chunked
    Date=Thu, 23 May 2013 07:57:40 GMT

    {
    "data": [
    {
    "resourceName": "/",
    "resourceId": 10041,
    "typeName": "File System",
    "typeId": 10013,

    ],
    "pageSize": 2,
    "currentPage": 1,
    "lastPage": 152,
    "totalSize": 305,
    "links": [
    {
    "next": {
    "href": "http://localhost:7080/rest/resource?ps=2&category=service&page=2"
    }
    },

    }

Please try this if you can. We want to get that into a "finished" state (as for the whole REST-Api) for RHQ 4.8

2 comments:

  1. Nice! The best of both worlds. Server side developers can use the more standard header method and client side ajax requests can consume the inline method.

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  2. Very good resolution indeed!

    ReplyDelete