RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

Returning additional metadata with responses

We discussed a few examples in the previous section for retrieving resources via the HTTP GET request. The resource class implementations that we used in these examples were simply returning plain Java constructs in response to the method call. What if you want to return extra metadata, such as the Cache-Control header or the status code, along with the result (resource representation)?

JAX-RS allows you to return additional metadata via the javax.ws.rs.core.Response class, which wraps the entity and any additional metadata, such as the HTTP headers, HTTP cookie, and status code. You can create a Response instance by using javax.ws.rs.core.Response.ResponseBuilder as a factory. The following example ...