How to return an array from a Restful Web service?

Question

I have the following web service in which I want to return and values of array

@GET
@Consumes("text/plain")
@Produces("text/plain")
public String[] getText(@PathParam("name") String Uname) {
    //TODO return proper representation object
    System.out.println("In Method " + Uname);
    String arr[]=null;
     arr=new String[2];
    arr[0]="demo";
    arr[1]="demo2";
    return arr;
}

But when I test this web services it is giving me this error: GET RequestFailed RequestFailed --> Status: (406) Response: {

So what should I do if I want to return an array from a REST webservice?

Do you want to return an array represented as XML? This might help: java.dzone.com/articles/xml-bindings-jaxb-and-jax-rs — OakNinja
– OakNinja, Commented Mar 2, 2013 at 1:36
Not really I want to return as Plain Text I have made the change in the original post. — CSSG
– CSSG, Commented Mar 2, 2013 at 1:46

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:43:21Z

2

HTTP responses do not support Arrays in plain text responses. You either need to manually represent your array as a String, change the return type to String and return like this:

return Arrays.toString(arr);

Or you could convert your array to a List: return Arrays.asList(arr);

and use the approach to return it as JSON or XML here: Jersey: Return a list of strings

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:43

CommunityBot

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answered Mar 2, 2013 at 1:50

Alb

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2 Comments

CSSG Over a year ago

Hey, your first trick works. Could be please explain this statement with some example " encode your response as as JSON array and return that as a String " How to do this I have no idea ?

Alb Over a year ago

@CSSG I edited my answer to link to another post with more details. This is only useful however if you want your response as JSON or XML instead of plain text.

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