javax.ws.rs

Annotation Type Path

@Target(value={TYPE,METHOD})
@Retention(value=RUNTIME)
public @interface Path

Identifies the URI path that a resource class or class method will serve requests for.

Paths are relative. For an annotated class the base URI is the application path, see ApplicationPath. For an annotated method the base URI is the effective URI of the containing class. For the purposes of absolutizing a path against the base URI , a leading '/' in a path is ignored and base URIs are treated as if they ended in '/'. E.g.:

@Path("widgets")
public class WidgetsResource {
  @GET
  String getList() {...}
 
  @GET @Path("{id}")
  String getWidget(@PathParam("id") String id) {...}
}

In the above, if the application path is catalogue and the application is deployed at http://example.com/, then GET requests for http://example.com/catalogue/widgets will be handled by the getList method while requests for http://example.com/catalogue/widgets/nnn (where nnn is some value) will be handled by the getWidget method. The same would apply if the value of either @Path annotation started with '/'.

Classes and methods may also be annotated with Consumes and Produces to filter the requests they will receive.

See Also:

Consumes, Produces, PathParam

Required Element Summary

Required Elements

Modifier and Type	Required Element and Description
java.lang.String	value Defines a URI template for the resource class or method, must not include matrix parameters.

Element Detail

value

public abstract java.lang.String value

Defines a URI template for the resource class or method, must not include matrix parameters.

Embedded template parameters are allowed and are of the form:

 param = "{" *WSP name *WSP [ ":" *WSP regex *WSP ] "}"
 name = (ALPHA / DIGIT / "_")*(ALPHA / DIGIT / "." / "_" / "-" ) ; \w[\w\.-]*
 regex = *( nonbrace / "{" *nonbrace "}" ) ; where nonbrace is any char other than "{" and "}"

See RFC 5234 for a description of the syntax used above and the expansions of WSP, ALPHA and DIGIT. In the above name is the template parameter name and the optional regex specifies the contents of the capturing group for the parameter. If regex is not supplied then a default value of [^/]+ which terminates at a path segment boundary, is used. Matching of request URIs to URI templates is performed against encoded path values and implementations will not escape literal characters in regex automatically, therefore any literals in regex should be escaped by the author according to the rules of RFC 3986 section 3.3. Caution is recommended in the use of regex, incorrect use can lead to a template parameter matching unexpected URI paths. See Pattern for further information on the syntax of regular expressions. Values of template parameters may be extracted using PathParam.

The literal part of the supplied value (those characters that are not part of a template parameter) is automatically percent encoded to conform to the path production of RFC 3986 section 3.3. Note that percent encoded values are allowed in the literal part of the value, an implementation will recognize such values and will not double encode the '%' character.