Better parameterized type serialization for the request body in RestTemplate [SPR-13154]

[spring-projects-issues]

Sébastien Deleuze opened SPR-13154 and commented

Since #17408 make it possible to use parameterized type for writing the response body, it would be nice to be able to do the same for request body in client side use cases.

Since we don't have this information in the method declaration like for server side, the user will have to provide the type explicitly.

The proposal for this:

• Retaining the type as an RequestEntity#type property
• In RequestEntity.BodyBuilder, adding RequestEntity<T> body(T body, Type type) method
• In RestTemplate#doWithRequest(), use RequestEntity#type if defined to get the type information, and call the type-aware canWrite() and write() methods if the message converter implements GenericHttpMessageConverter

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Issue Links:

• Make @ResponseBody method return type available to message converters [SPR-12811] #17408 Make @ResponseBody method return type available to message converters

Referenced from: commits 3329abf

0 votes, 5 watchers

[spring-projects-issues]

Sébastien Deleuze commented

Juergen Hoeller Rossen Stoyanchev Arjen Poutsma Brian Clozel I would be interested by your feedback about one of the choices we have to make here:

• We can add a Type type property to HttpEntity to fully describe the (potentially generic) type of the body, with the advantage of avoiding to add a bunch of new methods to RestTemplate
• We can keep HttpEntity as it is, and add ParameterizedTypeReference<T> requestType parameter variants to RestTemplate, but this class has already a huge API and combining the existing variants with a new ParameterizedTypeReference<T> requestType parameter is not a free lunch.

Any thoughts?

[spring-projects-issues]

Sébastien Deleuze commented

As discussed during a previous meeting, I have implemented this with a RequestEntity#type property. Draft commit available here (pending review with Arjen Poutsma).

[spring-projects-issues]

Sébastien Deleuze commented

Resolved by this commit.