Table of contents

• 1. But What’s an HTTP Entity?
     • 1.1. Http Entity Request Headers
     • 1.2. Http Entity Request Body
     • 1.3. Http Entity Response Headers
     • 1.4. Http Entity Response Body
     • 1.5. Http response status codes
• 1. Response Entity in Spring
     • 2.1. ResponseEntity short Example:

What’s ResponseEntity in Spring Boot and How to use it in Rest Api?

Response Entity in Spring is the embodiment of an HTTP response entity: the Header, the body and status.

1. But What’s an HTTP Entity?

See whenever we make a request to a web server e.g opening a url in our browser or get a response back we get to send or receive an HTTP Entity that contains a lot of informations.

Let’s call it this way:

Http Entity is the basic building block in exchanging information between two parties in the web today

1.1. Http Entity Request Headers

Request Headers are all the fields that are being sent by the client: us to the server. The whole purpose of these fields is to pass additional data or metadata about the request.

An example is this:

I’ve opened www.stackoverflow.com in my Browser and when we open Chrome Dev Tools, we can see that we made a Get request with the following Headers:

All these informations have been sent to StackOverFlow when we simply opened the url in our Browser.

You can see some of the informations like our browser type. I’ve highlighted that in yellow. This header is called user-agent.

Other informations could be sent to tailor the response but more on that in the future.

We call these Request Headers because it’s us that sends them and we can of course choose what we send to the server but not using the browser.

1.2. Http Entity Request Body

Request Body is the data sent by the client: us to the server.

In the aformentionned example, we’ve only sent Request Headers but we didn’t send other data along side the request.

If we wanted to do that, we need to send them in the Request Body.

Check this out:

In this example, we sent a request to Google with some of our informations like our email etc.

1.3. Http Entity Response Headers

Likewise, Response Headers are all the fields that are being sent by the server to us. The whole purpose of these fields is to pass additional data or metadata about the response.

Check this example:

We use the same example as before. But this time, we check the Response Headers from Stackoverflow.

One of the fields that are being sent is Content-type. This field is indicating that the content served by the server is an html document, not xml or json or any other type of content.

1.4. Http Entity Response Body

Response Body is the data sent by the server to the client. It could be a document like an html file or some other type of data.

Earlier we received a html document from stackoverflow

Check this example:

1.5. Http response status codes

Http status is what indicates to the client if the Request sent is successfull or not.

Since this is the only way of knowing what happened to the request, there are many status codes.

Some of these are:

1. **200** code: indicating that the request has succeeded.
2. **400** code: indicating that the server can't process the request due an error with the request (either a malformed request, invalid data etc.).
3. **301** code: indicating that the requested resource has been moved to a new url.

2. Response Entity in Spring

Now since we understand what’s response Http Entity is Let’s move back to Spring.

in Spring, a Response Entity is represented by the class ResponseEntity<Type> where Type represents the Body that will be returned to the client.

ResponseEntity takes three parameters:

1. `ResponseBody` this could be any type like `String`, a number or even another `Object`.
2. `HttpHeaders` this is class that we initiate and we add to it any **standard** or *custom* headers.
3. `HttpStatus` this is an `enum` that represents the **status** of the request.

2.1. ResponseEntity short Example:

@GetMapping("/coupons")
    public ResponseEntity<Object> getAllCoupons() {
        // Get All Coupons from Database
        List<Coupon> coupons = couponService.getAllCoupons();

        // Create an Object with a successful message and send all the coupons
        Map<String, Object> mapResponse = new LinkedHashMap<String,Object>();
        map.put("message", "All coupons retrieved successfully");        
        map.put("data", coupons);

        // Send the response to the client
        return new ResponseEntity<Object>(mapResponse, HttpStatus.OK);
    }

In this example, we didn’t set any Headers, we left the field empty.

However, We send the data requested by the client with a message and Httpstatus code of OK or 200 indicating a successfull request.

Now how to use ResponseEntity with a Restful api?

First, we need to annotate the Mother Controller with the following Annotations:

// Indicates this class is a controller and to serialize (convert) any object to Json and to pass it as HttpResponse
@RestController 

// Specify the parent endpoint
@RequestMapping(value = "/api" ) 
public class CouponController {

    // Specifies the path or route and the http method to map to this function
   @GetMapping("/coupons")
    public ResponseEntity<Object> getAllCoupons() {
        // Get All Coupons from Database
        List<Coupon> coupons = couponService.getAllCoupons();

        // Create an Object with a successful message and send all the coupons
        Map<String, Object> mapResponse = new LinkedHashMap<String,Object>();
        map.put("message", "All coupons retrieved successfully");        
        map.put("data", coupons);

        // Send the response to the client
        return new ResponseEntity<Object>(mapResponse, HttpStatus.OK);
    }

}

and you are ready to go.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we’ve learned the details of an Http Entity and how to use Response Entity in Spring and Rest api.

You can find the full source code on github here.