Posts Tagged RESTful Web Services

Using soapUI to Test RESTful Web Services

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Java Development on April 16, 2013

Introduction

There are many excellent tools available to test RESTful web services. Applications like Fiddler, cURL, Firefox with Firebug, and Google Chrome’s Advanced REST Client and REST Console are commonly used by developers and test engineers. Another powerful tool, used by many enterprise software development organizations, is soapUI by SmatBear Software.

SmartBear offers several versions, from the free open-source edition (shown here), to the full-featured soapUI Pro. Although, soapUI Pro has many useful advanced features, the free edition is fine to start with. Here is a product comparison of the various editions available from SmartBear.

SmartBear’s soapUI is available for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux (shown here). The application supports a wide range of technologies, including SOAP, WSDL, REST, HTTP, HTTPS, AMF, JDBC, JMS, WS-I Integeration, WS-Security, WS-Addressing, WS-Reliable Messaging, according to the SmartBear web site. It is easy to download and install.

Testing RESTful Web Services with soapUI

In my last post, we used JDBC to map JPA entity classes to tables and views within a MySQL database. We then built RESTful web services, EJB classes, which communicated with MySQL through the entities. The RESTful web services, part of a Java Web Application, were deployed to GlassFish.

Using that post’s RESTful web services, here is a quick example of how easy it is to use the free, open-source edition of soapUI to test those services. Start by locating the address of the RESTful service’s WADL. The WADL address is displayed in the upper left corner of the NetBeans’ browser-based test page, shown in the earlier post.

Displaying the RESTful Web Services WADL

Next, create a new soapUI project. Give the project the WADL address and a project name.

Creating a New soapUI Project

Using the WADL, soapUI will create sample HTTP Request for each service resource’s methods (left-side of screen). Populating the sample request with any required input parameters, you make an HTTP Request to the service’s method.

In this first example, I call the Actor resource’s ‘findAll’ method using an HTTP GET method. The call to ‘http://localhost:8080/MySQLDemoService/webresources/com.mysql.entities.actor’ results in an HTTP Response with the list of Actor objects, mapped (serialized) to JSON (right-side of screen).

Results of Querying the Actor’s findAll Method

In this second example, I call the Film resource’s ‘Id’ method, to locate a single Film object, using the HTTP GET method. The call to ‘http://localhost:8080/MySQLDemoService/webresources/com.mysql.entities.film/719’ results in an HTTP Response with the a single Film object, identified by Id 719. This time the object is marshalled to XML, instead of JSON.

Querying the Film’s Id Method with Input Parameter

Linux, REST, RESTful Web Services, SmartBear, soapUI, Testing, WADL

RESTful Mobile: Consuming Java EE RESTful Web Services Using jQuery Mobile

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Java Development, Mobile HTML Development, Software Development on October 18, 2012

Use jQuery Mobile to build a mobile HTML website, capable of calling Jersey-specific Java EE RESTful web services and displaying JSONP in a mobile web browser.

Both NetBeans projects used in this post are available on DropBox. If you like DropBox, please use this link to sign up for a free 2 GB account. It will help me post more files to DropBox for future posts.

Background

In the previous two-part series, Returning JSONP from Java EE RESTful Web Services Using jQuery, Jersey, and GlassFish, we created a Jersey-specific RESTful web service from a database using EclipseLink (JPA 2.0 Reference Implementation), Jersey (JAX-RS Reference Implementation), JAXB, and Jackson Java JSON-processor. The service and associated entity class mapped to a copy of Microsoft SQL Server’s Adventure Works database. An HTML and jQuery-based client called the service, which returned a JSONP response payload. The JSON data it contained was formatted and displayed in a simple HTML table, in a web-browser.

Objectives

In this post, we will extend the previous example to the mobile platform. Using jQuery and jQuery Mobile JavaScript libraries, we will call two RESTful web services and display the resulting JSONP data using the common list/detail UX design pattern. We will display a list of Adventure Works employees. When the end-user clicks on an employee in the web-browser, a new page will display detailed demographic information about that employee.

Similar to the previous post, when the client website is accessed by the end-user in a mobile web browser, the client site’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are downloaded and cached on the end-users machine. The JavaScript file, using jQuery and Ajax, makes a call to the RESTful web service, which returns JSON (or, JSONP in this case). This simulates a typical cross-domain situation where a client needs to consume RESTful web services from a remote source. This is not allowed by the same origin policy, but overcome by returning JSONP to the client, which wraps the JSON payload in a function call.

We will extend both the ‘JerseyRESTfulServices’ and ‘JerseyRESTfulClient’ projects we built in the last series of posts. Here are the high-level steps we will walk-through in this post:

Create a second view (virtual table) in the Adventure Works database;
Create a second entity class that maps to the new database view;
Modify the existing entity class, adding JAXB and Jackson JSON annotations;
Create a second Jersey-specific RESTful web service from the new entity using Jersey and Jackson;
Modify the existing Jersey-specific RESTful web service, adding one new methods;
Modify the web.xml file to allow us to use natural JSON notation;
Implement a JAXBContext resolver to serialize the JSON using natural JSON notation;
Create a simple list/detail two-page mobile HTML5 website using jQuery Mobile;
Use jQuery, Ajax, and CSS to call, parse, and display the JSONP returned by the service.

RESTful Web Services Project

When we are done, the final RESTful web services projects will look like the screen-grab, below. It will contain (2) entity classes, (2) RESTful web service classes, (1) JAXBContext resolver class, and the web.xml configuration file:

JerseyRESTfulServices Project View in NetBeans

1: Create the Second Database View
Create a new database view, vEmployeeNames, in the Adventure Works database:

USE [AdventureWorks]
GO

SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO

CREATE VIEW [HumanResources].[vEmployeeNames]
AS
SELECT TOP (100) PERCENT BusinessEntityID, REPLACE(RTRIM(LastName 
     + COALESCE (' ' + Suffix + '', N'') + COALESCE (', ' + FirstName + ' ', N'') 
     + COALESCE (MiddleName + ' ', N'')), '  ', ' ') AS FullName
FROM Person.Person
WHERE (PersonType = 'EM')
ORDER BY FullName
GO

2: Create the Second Entity
Add the new VEmployeeNames.java entity class, mapped to the vEmployeeNames database view, using NetBeans’ ‘Entity Classes from Database…’ wizard. Then, modify the class to match the code below.

package entities;

import java.io.Serializable;
import javax.persistence.Basic;
import javax.persistence.Column;
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.Id;
import javax.persistence.NamedQueries;
import javax.persistence.NamedQuery;
import javax.persistence.Table;
import javax.validation.constraints.NotNull;
import javax.validation.constraints.Size;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlType;

@Entity
@Table(name = "vEmployeeNames", catalog = "AdventureWorks", schema = "HumanResources")
@XmlRootElement(name = "vEmployeeNames")
@NamedQueries({
    @NamedQuery(name = "VEmployeeNames.findAll", query = "SELECT v FROM VEmployeeNames v"),
    @NamedQuery(name = "VEmployeeNames.findByBusinessEntityID", query = "SELECT v FROM VEmployeeNames v WHERE v.businessEntityID = :businessEntityID"),
    @NamedQuery(name = "VEmployeeNames.findByFullName", query = "SELECT v FROM VEmployeeNames v WHERE v.fullName = :fullName")})
public class VEmployeeNames implements Serializable {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Id
    @Column(name = "BusinessEntityID")
    private int businessEntityID;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Size(min = 1, max = 102)
    @Column(name = "FullName")
    private String fullName;

    public VEmployeeNames() {
    }

    public int getBusinessEntityID() {
        return businessEntityID;
    }

    public void setBusinessEntityID(int businessEntityID) {
        this.businessEntityID = businessEntityID;
    }

    public String getFullName() {
        return fullName;
    }

    public void setFullName(String fullName) {
        this.fullName = fullName;
    }
}

3: Modify the Existing Entity
Modify the existing VEmployee.java entity class to use JAXB and Jackson JSON Annotations as shown below (class code abridged). Note the addition of the @XmlType(propOrder = { "businessEntityID"... }) to the class, the @JsonProperty(value = ...) tags to each member variable, and the @Id tag to the businessEntityID, which serves as the entity’s primary key. We will see the advantages of the first two annotations later in the post when we return the JSON to the client.

package entities;

import java.io.Serializable;
import javax.persistence.Basic;
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.Id;
import javax.persistence.NamedQueries;
import javax.persistence.NamedQuery;
import javax.persistence.Table;
import javax.validation.constraints.NotNull;
import javax.validation.constraints.Size;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlType;
import org.codehaus.jackson.annotate.JsonProperty;

@Entity
@Table(name = "vEmployee", catalog = "AdventureWorks", schema = "HumanResources")
@XmlRootElement
@NamedQueries({
    @NamedQuery(name = "VEmployee.findAll", query = "SELECT v FROM VEmployee v"),
    ...})
    @XmlType(propOrder = {
    "businessEntityID",
    "title",
    "firstName",
    "middleName",
    "lastName",
    "suffix",
    "jobTitle",
    "phoneNumberType",
    "phoneNumber",
    "emailAddress",
    "emailPromotion",
    "addressLine1",
    "addressLine2",
    "city",
    "stateProvinceName",
    "postalCode",
    "countryRegionName",
    "additionalContactInfo"
})
public class VEmployee implements Serializable {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Id
    @JsonProperty(value = "Employee ID")
    private int businessEntityID;
    @Size(max = 8)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Title")
    private String title;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Size(min = 1, max = 50)
    @JsonProperty(value = "First Name")
    private String firstName;
    @Size(max = 50)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Middle Name")
    private String middleName;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Size(min = 1, max = 50)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Last Name")
    private String lastName;
    @Size(max = 10)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Suffix")
    private String suffix;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Size(min = 1, max = 50)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Job Title")
    private String jobTitle;
    @Size(max = 25)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Phone Number")
    private String phoneNumber;
    @Size(max = 50)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Phone Number Type")
    private String phoneNumberType;
    @Size(max = 50)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Email Address")
    private String emailAddress;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @JsonProperty(value = "Email Promotion")
    private int emailPromotion;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Size(min = 1, max = 60)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Address Line 1")
    private String addressLine1;
    @Size(max = 60)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Address Line 2")
    private String addressLine2;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Size(min = 1, max = 30)
    @JsonProperty(value = "City")
    private String city;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Size(min = 1, max = 50)
    @JsonProperty(value = "State or Province Name")
    private String stateProvinceName;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Size(min = 1, max = 15)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Postal Code")
    private String postalCode;
    @Basic(optional = false)
    @NotNull
    @Size(min = 1, max = 50)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Country or Region Name")
    private String countryRegionName;
    @Size(max = 2147483647)
    @JsonProperty(value = "Additional Contact Info")
    private String additionalContactInfo;

    public VEmployee() {
    }
    ...
}

4: Create the New RESTful Web Service
Add the new VEmployeeNamesFacadeREST.java RESTful web service class using NetBean’s ‘RESTful Web Services from Entity Classes…’ wizard. Then, modify the new class, adding the new findAllJSONP() method shown below (class code abridged). This method call the same super.findAll() method from the parent AbstractFacade.java class as the default findAll({id}) method. However, the findAllJSONP() method returns JSONP instead of XML or JSON, as findAll({id}) does. This is done by passing the results of super.findAll() to a new instance of Jersey’s JSONWithPadding() class (com.sun.jersey.api.json.JSONWithPadding).

package service;

import com.sun.jersey.api.json.JSONWithPadding;
import entities.VEmployeeNames;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.List;
import javax.ejb.Stateless;
import javax.persistence.EntityManager;
import javax.persistence.PersistenceContext;
import javax.persistence.criteria.CriteriaBuilder;
import javax.persistence.criteria.CriteriaQuery;
import javax.persistence.criteria.Root;
import javax.ws.rs.Consumes;
import javax.ws.rs.DELETE;
import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.POST;
import javax.ws.rs.PUT;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.PathParam;
import javax.ws.rs.Produces;
import javax.ws.rs.QueryParam;
import javax.ws.rs.core.GenericEntity;

@Stateless
@Path("entities.vemployeenames")
public class VEmployeeNamesFacadeREST extends AbstractFacade<VEmployeeNames> {
    ...
    @GET
    @Path("jsonp")
    @Produces({"application/javascript"})
    public JSONWithPadding findAllJSONP(@QueryParam("callback") String callback) {
        CriteriaBuilder cb = getEntityManager().getCriteriaBuilder();
        CriteriaQuery cq = cb.createQuery();
        Root empRoot = cq.from(VEmployeeNames.class);
        cq.select(empRoot);
        cq.orderBy(cb.asc(empRoot.get("fullName")));
        javax.persistence.Query q = getEntityManager().createQuery(cq);

        List<VEmployeeNames> employees = q.getResultList();
        return new JSONWithPadding(
                new GenericEntity<Collection<VEmployeeNames>>(employees) {
                }, callback);
    }
    ...
}

5: Modify the Existing Service
Modify the existing VEmployeeFacadeREST.java RESTful web service class, adding the findJSONP() method shown below (class code abridged). This method calls the same super.find({id}) in the AbstractFacade.java parent class as the default find({id}) method, but returns JSONP instead of XML or JSON. As with the previous service class above, this is done by passing the results to a new instance of Jersey’s JSONWithPadding() class (com.sun.jersey.api.json.JSONWithPadding). There are no changes required to the default AbstractFacade.java class.

package service;

import com.sun.jersey.api.json.JSONWithPadding;
import entities.VEmployee;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.List;
import javax.ejb.Stateless;
import javax.persistence.EntityManager;
import javax.persistence.PersistenceContext;
import javax.persistence.criteria.CriteriaBuilder;
import javax.persistence.criteria.CriteriaQuery;
import javax.persistence.criteria.Root;
import javax.ws.rs.Consumes;
import javax.ws.rs.DELETE;
import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.POST;
import javax.ws.rs.PUT;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.PathParam;
import javax.ws.rs.Produces;
import javax.ws.rs.QueryParam;
import javax.ws.rs.core.GenericEntity;

@Stateless
@Path("entities.vemployee")
public class VEmployeeFacadeREST extends AbstractFacade<VEmployee> {
    ...
    @GET
    @Path("{id}/jsonp")
    @Produces({"application/javascript"})
    public JSONWithPadding findJSONP(@PathParam("id") Integer id,
            @QueryParam("callback") String callback) {
        List<VEmployee> employees = new ArrayList<VEmployee>();
        employees.add(super.find(id));
        return new JSONWithPadding(
                new GenericEntity<Collection<VEmployee>>(employees) {
                }, callback);
    }
    ...
}

6: Allow POJO JSON Support
Add the JSONConfiguration.FEATURE_POJO_MAPPING servlet init parameter to web.xml, as shown below (xml abridged). According to the Jersey website, this will allow us to use POJO support, the easiest way to convert our Java Objects to JSON. It is based on the Jackson library.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="3.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd">
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>ServletAdaptor</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</servlet-class>
        <init-param>
            <description>Multiple packages, separated by semicolon(;), can be specified in param-value</description>
            <param-name>com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages</param-name>
            <param-value>service</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>com.sun.jersey.api.json.POJOMappingFeature</param-name>
            <param-value>true</param-value>
        </init-param>
        ...

7: Implement a JAXBContext Resolver
Create the VEmployeeFacadeREST.java JAXBContext resolver class, shown below. This allows us to serialize the JSON using natural JSON notation. A good explanation of the use of a JAXBContext resolver can be found on the Jersey website.

package config;

import com.sun.jersey.api.json.JSONConfiguration;
import com.sun.jersey.api.json.JSONJAXBContext;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.ContextResolver;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;
import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext;

@Provider
public class JAXBContextResolver implements ContextResolver<JAXBContext> {

    JAXBContext jaxbContext;
    private Class[] types = {entities.VEmployee.class, entities.VEmployeeNames.class};

    public JAXBContextResolver() throws Exception {
        this.jaxbContext =
                new JSONJAXBContext(JSONConfiguration.natural().build(), types);
    }

    @Override
    public JAXBContext getContext(Class<?> objectType) {
        for (Class type : types) {
            if (type == objectType) {
                return jaxbContext;
            }
        }
        return null;
    }
}

What is Natural JSON Notation?
According to the Jersey website, “with natural notation, Jersey will automatically figure out how individual items need to be processed, so that you do not need to do any kind of manual configuration. Java arrays and lists are mapped into JSON arrays, even for single-element cases. Java numbers and booleans are correctly mapped into JSON numbers and booleans, and you do not need to bother with XML attributes, as in JSON, they keep the original names.”

What does that mean? Better yet, what does that look like? Here is an example of an employee record, first as plain old JAXB JSON in a JSONP wrapper:

callback({"vEmployee":{"businessEntityID":"211","firstName":"Hazem","middleName":"E","lastName":"Abolrous","jobTitle":"Quality Assurance Manager","phoneNumberType":"Work","phoneNumber":"869-555-0125","emailAddress":"hazem0@adventure-works.com","emailPromotion":"0","addressLine1":"5050 Mt. Wilson Way","city":"Kenmore","stateProvinceName":"Washington","postalCode":"98028","countryRegionName":"United States"}})

And second, JSON wrapped in JSONP, using Jersey’s natural notation. Note the differences in the way the parent vEmployee node, numbers, and nulls are handled in natural JSON notation.

callback([{"Employee ID":211,"Title":null,"First Name":"Hazem","Middle Name":"E","Last Name":"Abolrous","Suffix":null,"Job Title":"Quality Assurance Manager","Phone Number Type":"Work","Phone Number":"869-555-0125","Email Address":"hazem0@adventure-works.com","Email Promotion":0,"Address Line 1":"5050 Mt. Wilson Way","Address Line 2":null,"City":"Kenmore","State or Province Name":"Washington","Postal Code":"98028","Country or Region Name":"United States","Additional Contact Info":null}])

Mobile Client Project

When we are done with the mobile client, the final RESTful web services mobile client NetBeans projects should look like the screen-grab, below. Note the inclusion of jQuery Mobile 1.2.0. You will need to download the library and associated components, and install them in the project. I chose to keep them in a separate folder since there were several files included with the library. This example requires a few new features introduced in jQuery Mobile 1.2.0. Make sure to get this version or later.

JerseyRESTfulClient Project View in NetBeans

8: Create a List/Detail Mobile HTML Site
The process to display the data from the Adventure Works database in the mobile web browser is identical to the process used in the last series of posts. We are still using jQuery with Ajax, calling the same services, but with a few new methods. The biggest change is the use of jQuery Mobile to display the employee data. The jQuery Mobile library, especially with the release of 1.2.0, makes displaying data, quick and elegant. The library does all the hard work under the covers, with the features such as the listview control. We simply need to use jQuery and Ajax to retrieve the data and pass it to the control.

We will create three new files. They include the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. We add a ‘.m’ to the file names to differentiate them from the normal web browser files from the last post. As with the previous post, the HTML page and CSS file are minimal. The HTML page uses the jQuery Mobile multi-page template available on the jQuery Mobile website. Although it appears as two different web pages to the end-user, it is actually a single-page site.

Source code for employee.m.html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head> 
        <title>Employee List</title> 
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> 
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

        <link rel="stylesheet" href="jquery.mobile-1.2.0/jquery.mobile-1.2.0.min.css" />
        <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="employees.m.css" />

        <script src="jquery-1.8.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="jquery.mobile-1.2.0/jquery.mobile-1.2.0.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="employees.m.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    </head> 
    <body> 
        <!-- Start of first page: #one -->
        <div data-role="page" id="one" data-theme="b">
            <div data-role="header" data-theme="b">
                <h1>Employee List</h1>
            </div><!-- /header -->
            <div data-role="content">	
                <div id="errorMessage"></div>
                <div class="ui-grid-solo">
                    <form>
                        <ul data-role="listview" data-filter="true" 
                            id="employeeList" data-theme="c" data-autodividers="true">
                        </ul>
                    </form>
                </div>
            </div><!-- /content -->
            <div data-role="footer" data-theme="b">
                <h4>Programmatic Ponderings, 2012</h4>
            </div><!-- /footer -->
        </div><!-- /page -->
        
        <!-- Start of second page: #two -->
        <div data-role="page" id="two" data-theme="c">
            <div data-role="header" data-theme="b">
                <a href="#one" data-icon="back">Return</a>
                <h1>Employee Detail</h1>
            </div><!-- /header -->
            <div data-role="content" data-theme="c">	
                <div id="employeeDetail"></div>
            </div><!-- /content -->
            <div data-role="footer" data-theme="b">
                <h4>Programmatic Ponderings, 2012</h4>
            </div><!-- /footer -->
        </div><!-- /page two -->
    </body>
</html>

Source code for employee.m.css:

#employeeList {
    clear:both;
}

#employeeDetail div {
    padding-top: 2px;
    white-space: nowrap;
}

.field {
    margin-bottom: 0px;
    font-size: smaller;
    color: #707070;
}

.value {
    font-weight: bolder;
    padding-bottom: 12px;
    border-bottom: 1px #d0d0d0 solid;
}

.ui-block-a{
    padding-left: 6px;
    padding-right: 6px;
}

.ui-grid-a{
    padding-bottom: 12px;
    padding-top: -6px;
}

8: Retrieve, Parse, and Display the Data
The mobile JavaScript file below is identical in many ways to the JavaScript file used in the last series of posts for a non-mobile browser. One useful change we have made is the addition of two arguments to the function that calls jQuery.Ajax(). The address of the service (URI) that the jQuery.Ajax() method requests, and the function that Ajax calls after successful completion, are both passed into the callService(Uri, successFunction) function as arguments. This allows us to reuse the Ajax method for different purposes. In this case, we call the function once to populate the Employee List with the full names of the employees. We call it again to populate the Employee Detail page with demographic information of a single employee chosen from the Employee List. Both calls are to different URIs representing the two different RESTful web services, which in turn are associated with the two different entities, which in turn are mapped to the two different database views.

callService = function (uri, successFunction) {
        $.ajax({
            cache: true,
            url: uri,
            data: "{}",
            type: "GET",
            contentType: "application/javascript",
            dataType: "jsonp",
            error: ajaxCallFailed,
            failure: ajaxCallFailed,
            success: successFunction
        });          
    };

The rest of the functions are self-explanatory. There are two calls to the jQuery Ajax method to return data from the service, two functions to parse and format the JSONP for display in the browser, and one jQuery method that adds click events to the Employee List. We perform a bit of string manipulation to imbed the employee id into the id property of each list item (li element. Later, when the end-user clicks on the employee name in the list, the employee id is extracted from the id property of the selected list item and passed back to the service to retrieve the employee detail. The HTML snippet below shows how a single employee row in the jQuery listview. Note the id property of the li element, id="empId_121", for employee id 121.

<li id="empId_121" class="ui-btn ui-btn-icon-right ui-li-has-arrow ui-li ui-btn-up-c" 
    data-corners="false" data-shadow="false" data-iconshadow="true" 
    data-wrapperels="div" data-icon="arrow-r" data-iconpos="right" data-theme="c">
    <div class="ui-btn-inner ui-li">
        <div class="ui-btn-text">
            <a class="ui-link-inherit" href="#">Ackerman, Pilar G</a>
        </div>
        <span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrow-r ui-icon-shadow"> </span>
    </div>
</li>

To make this example work, you need to change the restfulWebServiceBaseUri variable to the server and port of the GlassFish domain running your RESTful web services. If you are testing the client locally on your mobile device, I suggest using the IP address for the GlassFish server versus a domain name, which your phone will be able to connect to in your local wireless environment. At least on the iPhone, there is no easy way to change the hosts file to provide local domain name resolution.

Source code for employee.m.js:

// ===========================================================================
// 
// Author: Gary A. Stafford
// Website: http://www.programmaticponderings.com
// Description: Call RESTful Web Services from mobile HTML pages
//              using jQuery mobile, Jersey, Jackson, and EclipseLink
// 
// ===========================================================================

// Immediate function
(function () {
    "use strict";
    
    var restfulWebServiceBaseUri, employeeListFindAllUri, employeeByIdUri,
    callService, ajaxCallFailed,
    getEmployeeById, displayEmployeeList, displayEmployeeDetail;
    
    // Base URI of RESTful web service
    restfulWebServiceBaseUri = "http://your_server_name_or_ip:8080/JerseyRESTfulServices/webresources/";
    
    // URI maps to service.VEmployeeNamesFacadeREST.findAllJSONP
    employeeListFindAllUri = restfulWebServiceBaseUri + "entities.vemployeenames/jsonp";
        
    // URI maps to service.VEmployeeFacadeREST.findJSONP
    employeeByIdUri = restfulWebServiceBaseUri + "entities.vemployee/{id}/jsonp";
    
    
    // Execute after the page one dom is fully loaded
    $(".one").ready(function () {        
        // Retrieve employee list
        callService(employeeListFindAllUri, displayEmployeeList);
        
        // Attach onclick event to each row of employee list on page one
        $("#employeeList").on("click", "li", function(event){
            getEmployeeById($(this).attr("id").split("empId_").pop());
        });
    });
      
    // Call a service URI and return JSONP to a function
    callService = function (Uri, successFunction) {
        $.ajax({
            cache: true,
            url: Uri,
            data: "{}",
            type: "GET",
            contentType: "application/javascript",
            dataType: "jsonp",
            error: ajaxCallFailed,
            failure: ajaxCallFailed,
            success: successFunction
        });          
    };
    
    // Called if ajax call fails
    ajaxCallFailed = function (jqXHR, textStatus) { 
        console.log("Error: " + textStatus);
        console.log(jqXHR);
        $("form").css("visibility", "hidden");
        $("#errorMessage").empty().
        append("Sorry, there was an error.").
        css("color", "red");
    };
    
    // Display employee list on page one
    displayEmployeeList = function (employee) {
        var employeeList = "";
                
        $.each(employee, function(index, employee) {
            employeeList = employeeList.concat(
                "<li id=empId_" + employee.businessEntityID.toString() + ">" + 
                "<a href='#'>" + 
                employee.fullName.toString() + "</a></li>");
        });
        
        $('#employeeList').empty();
        $('#employeeList').append(employeeList).listview("refresh", true);
    };
    
    // Display employee detail on page two
    displayEmployeeDetail = function(employee) {
        $.mobile.loading( 'show', {
            text: '',
            textVisible: false,
            theme: 'a',
            html: ""
            
        });
        window.location = "#two";
        var employeeDetail = "";
                
        $.each(employee, function(key, value) {
            $.each(value, function(key, value) {
                if(!value) {
                    value = "&nbsp;";
                }
                
                employeeDetail = employeeDetail.concat(
                    "<div class='detail'>" +
                    "<div class='field'>" + key + "</div>" +
                    "<div class='value'>" + value + "</div>" +
                    "</div>");   
            });
        });
        
        $("#employeeDetail").empty().append(employeeDetail);
    };
    
    // Retrieve employee detail based on employee id
    getEmployeeById = function (employeeID) {
        callService(employeeByIdUri.replace("{id}", employeeID), displayEmployeeDetail);
    };
} ());

The Final Result

Viewed in Google’s Chrome for Mobile web browser on iOS 6, the previous project’s Employee List looks pretty bland and un-mobile like:

Previous Project as Viewed in Google Chrome Mobile Browser

Previous Project as Viewed in Google Chrome for Mobile Web Browser

However, with a little jQuery Mobile magic you get a simple yet effective and highly functional mobile web presentation. Seen below on page one, the Employee List is displayed in Safari on an iPhone 4 with iOS 6. It features some of the new capabilities of jQuery Mobile 1.2.0’s improved listview, including autodividers.

Employee List

Here again is the Employee List using the jQuery Mobile 1.2.0’s improved listview search filter bar:

Employee List – Filtered

Here is the Employee Detail on page 2. Note the order and names of the fields. Remember previously when we annotated the VEmployeeNames.java entity with the @XmlType(propOrder = {"businessEntityID", ...}) to the class and the @JsonProperty(value = ...) tags to each member variable. This is the results of those efforts; our JSON is delivered pre-sorted and titled the way we want. No need to handle those functions on the client-side. This allows the client to be loosely-coupled to the data. The client simply displays whichever key/value pairs are delivered in the JSONP response payload.

Employee Detail

Employee Detail – Bottom

AJAX, Apache Ant, Chrome, Domain, EclipseLink, GlassFish, HTML, iOS6, iPhone, jackson, Java, JAVA EE, JavaScript, JAX-RS, JAXB, JDBC, jersey, jersey-json, JPA, jQuery, jquery mobile, JSON, JSON with Padding, JSONP, JSONwithPadding, mobile, NetBeans, Persistence, REST, RESTful Web Services, same origin policy, SQL, SQL Server, SQL2008R2

4 Comments

Returning JSONP from Java EE RESTful Web Services Using jQuery, Jersey, and GlassFish – Part 2 of 2

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Java Development, Software Development on October 4, 2012

Create a Jersey-specific Java EE RESTful web service, and an HTML-based client to call the service and display JSONP. Test and deploy the service and the client to different remote instances of GlassFish.

Background

In part 1 of this series, we created a Jersey-specific RESTful web service from a database using NetBeans. The service returns JSONP in addition to JSON and XML. The service was deployed to a GlassFish domain, running on a Windows box. On this same box is the SQL Server instance, running the Adventure Works database, from which the service obtains data, via the entity class.

Objectives

In part two of this series, we will create a simple web client to consume and display the JSONP returned by the RESTful web service. There are many options available for creating a service consumer (client) depending on your development platform and project requirements. We will keep it simple, no complex, complied code, just HTML and JavaScript with jQuery, the well-known JavaScript library.

We will host the client on a separate GlassFish domain, running on an Ubuntu Linux VM using Oracle’s VM VirtualBox. This is a different machine than the service was installed on. When opened by the end-user in a web browser, the client files, including the JavaScript file that calls the service, are downloaded to the end-users machine. This will simulate a typical cross-domain situation where a client application needs to consume RESTful web services from a remote source. This is not allowed by the same origin policy, but overcome by returning JSONP to the client, which wraps the JSON payload in a function call.

Here are the high-level steps we will walk-through in part two:

Create a simple HTML client using jQuery and ajax to call the RESTful web service;
Add jQuery functionality to parse and display the JSONP returned by the service;
Deploy the client to a separate remote instance of GlassFish using Apache Ant;
Test the client’s ability to call the service across domains and display JSONP.

Creating the RESTful Web Service Client

New NetBeans Web Application Project
Create a new Java Web Application project in NetBeans. Name the project ‘JerseyRESTfulClient’. The choice of GlassFish server and domain where the project will be deployed is unimportant. We will use Apache Ant to deploy the client when we finish the building the project. By default, I chose my local instance of GlassFish, for testing purposes.

Create a New Web Application Project in NetBeans

Name and Location of New Web Application Project

01c - Create a New Web Application Project in NetBeans

Server and Settings of New Web Application Project

01d - Create a New Web Application Project in NetBeans

Optional Frameworks to Include in New Web Application Project

01e - Create a New Web Application Project in NetBeans

View of New Web Application Project in NetBeans

Adding Files to Project
The final client project will contains four new files:

employees.html – HTML web page that displays a list of employees;
employees.css – CSS information used to by employees.html;
employees.js – JavaScript code used to by employees.html;
jquery-1.8.2.min.js – jQuery 1.8.2 JavaScript library, minified.

First, we need to download and install jQuery. At the time of this post, jQuery 1.8.2 was the latest version. I installed the minified version (jquery-1.8.2.min.js) to save space.

Next, we will create the three new files (employees.html, employees.css, and employees.js), using the code below. When finished, we need to place all four files into the ‘Web Pages’ folder. The final project should look like:

Final Client Project View

HTML
The HTML file is the smallest of the three files. The HTML page references the CSS file, the JavaScript file, and the jQuery library file. The CSS file provides the presentation (look and feel) and JavaScript file, using jQuery, dynamically provides much of the content that the HTML page normally would contain.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Employee List</title>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
        <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="employees.css" />
        <script src="jquery-1.8.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="employees.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="pageTitle">Employee List</div>
        <div id="employeeList"></div>
    </body>
</html>

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
The CSS file is also pretty straight-forward. The pageTitle and employeeList id selectors and type selectors are used directly by the HTML page. The class selectors are all applied to the page by jQuery, in the JavaScript file.

body {
    font-family: sans-serif;
    font-size: small;
    padding-left: 6px;
}

span {
    padding: 6px;
    display: inline-block;
}

div {
    border-bottom: lightgray solid 1px;
}

#pageTitle {
    font-size: medium;
    font-weight: bold;
    padding: 12px 0px 12px 0px;
    border: none;
}

#employeeList {
    float: left;
    border: gray solid 1px;
}

.empId {
    width: 50px;
    text-align: center;
    border-right: lightgray solid 1px;
}

.name {
    width: 200px;
    border-right: lightgray solid 1px;
}

.jobTitle {
    width: 250px;
}

.header {
    font-weight: bold;
    border-bottom: gray solid 1px;
}

.even{
    background-color: rgba(0, 255, 128, 0.09);
}

.odd {
    background-color: rgba(0, 255, 128, 0.05);
}

.last {
    border-bottom: none;
}

jQuery and JavaScript
The JavaScript file is where all the magic happens. There are two primary functions. First, getEmployees, which calls the jQuery.ajax() method. According jQuery’s website, the jQuery Ajax method performs an asynchronous HTTP (Ajax) request. In this case, it calls our RESTful web service and returns JSONP. The jQuery Ajax method uses an HTTP GET method to request the following service resource (URI):

http://[your-service's-glassfish-server-name]:[your-service's-glassfish-domain-port]/JerseyRESTfulService/webresources/entities.vemployee/{from}/{to}/jsonp?callback={callback}.

The base (root) URI of the service in the URI above is as follows:

http://[server]:[port]/JerseyRESTfulService/webresources/entities.vemployee/

This is followed by a series of elements (nodes), {from}/{to}/jsonp, which together form a reference to a specific method in our service. As explained in the first post of this series, we include the /jsonp element to indicate we want to call the new findRangeJsonP method to return JSONP, as opposed to findRange method that returns JSON or XML. We pass the {from} path parameter a value of ‘0’ and the {to} path parameter a value of ‘10’.

Lastly, the method specifies the callback function name for the JSONP request, parseResponse, using the jsonpCallback setting. This value will be used instead of the random name automatically generated by jQuery. The callback function name is appended to the end of the URI as a query parameter. The final URL is as follows:

http://[server]:[port]/JerseyRESTfulService/webresources/entities.vemployee/0/10/jsonp?callback=parseResponse.

Note the use of the jsonpCallback setting is not required, or necessarily recommended by jQuery. Without it, jQuery generate a unique name as it will make it easier to manage the requests and provide callbacks and error handling. This example will work fine if you exclude the jsonpCallback: "parseResponse" setting.

getEmployees = function () {
    $.ajax({
        cache: true,
        url: restfulWebServiceURI,
        data: "{}",
        type: "GET",
        jsonpCallback: "parseResponse",
        contentType: "application/javascript",
        dataType: "jsonp",
        error: ajaxCallFailed,
        failure: ajaxCallFailed,
        success: parseResponse
    });
};

Once we have successfully returned the JSONP, the jQuery Ajax method calls the parseResponse(data) function, passing the JSON to the data argument. The parseResponse function iterates through the employee objects using the jQuery.each() method. Each field of data is surrounding with span and div tags, and concatenated to the employeeList string variable. The string is appended to the div tag with the id of ‘employeeList’, using jQuery’s .append() method. The result is an HTML table-like grid of employee names, ids, and job title, displayed on the employees.html page.

Lastly, we call the colorRows() function. This function uses jQuery’s .addClass(className) to assign CSS classes to objects in the DOM. The classes are added to stylize the grid with alternating row colors and other formatting.

parseResponse = function (data) {
    var employee = data.vEmployee;

    var employeeList = "";

    employeeList = employeeList.concat("<div class='header'>" +
        "<span class='empId'>Id</span>" +
        "<span class='name'>Employee Name</span>" +
        "<span class='jobTitle'>Job Title</span>" +
        "</div>");

    $.each(employee, function(index, employee) {
        employeeList = employeeList.concat("<div class='employee'>" +
            "<span class='empId'>" +
            employee.businessEntityID +
            "</span><span class='name'>" +
            employee.firstName + " " + employee.lastName +
            "</span><span class='jobTitle'>" +
            employee.jobTitle +
            "</span></div>");
    });

    $("#employeeList").empty();
    $("#employeeList").append(employeeList);
    colorRows();
};

Here are the complete JavaScript file contents:

// Immediate function
(function () {
    "use strict";
    
    var restfulWebServiceURI, getEmployees, ajaxCallFailed, colorRows, parseResponse;
    
    restfulWebServiceURI = "http://[your-service's-server-name]:[your-service's-port]/JerseyRESTfulService/webresources/entities.vemployee/0/10/jsonp";
    
    // Execute after the DOM is fully loaded
    $(document).ready(function () {
        getEmployees();
    });

    // Retrieve Employee List as JSONP
    getEmployees = function () {
        $.ajax({
            cache: true,
            url: restfulWebServiceURI,
            data: "{}",
            type: "GET",
            jsonpCallback: "parseResponse",
            contentType: "application/javascript",
            dataType: "jsonp",
            error: ajaxCallFailed,
            failure: ajaxCallFailed,
            success: parseResponse
        });          
    };
    
    // Called if ajax call fails
    ajaxCallFailed = function (jqXHR, textStatus) { 
        console.log("Error: " + textStatus);
        console.log(jqXHR);
        $("#employeeList").empty();
        $("#employeeList").append("Error: " + textStatus);
    };
            
    // Called if ajax call is successful
    parseResponse = function (data) {
        var employee = data.vEmployee;   
        
        var employeeList = "";
        
        employeeList = employeeList.concat("<div class='header'>" +
            "<span class='empId'>Id</span>" + 
            "<span class='name'>Employee Name</span>" + 
            "<span class='jobTitle'>Job Title</span>" + 
            "</div>"); 
        
        $.each(employee, function(index, employee) {
            employeeList = employeeList.concat("<div class='employee'>" +
                "<span class='empId'>" +
                employee.businessEntityID + 
                "</span><span class='name'>" +
                employee.firstName + " " + employee.lastName +
                "</span><span class='jobTitle'>" +
                employee.jobTitle + 
                "</span></div>");
        });
        
        $("#employeeList").empty();
        $("#employeeList").append(employeeList);
        colorRows();
    };
    
    // Styles the Employee List
    colorRows = function(){
        $("#employeeList .employee:odd").addClass("odd");
        $("#employeeList .employee:even").addClass("even");
        $("#employeeList .employee:last").addClass("last");
    };
} ());

Deployment to GlassFish
To deploy the RESTful web service client to GlassFish, run the following Apache Ant target. The target first calls the clean and dist targets to build the .war file, Then, the target calls GlassFish’s asadmin deploy command. It specifies the remote GlassFish server, admin port, admin user, admin password (in the password file), secure or insecure connection, the name of the container, and the name of the .war file to be deployed. Note that the server is different for the client than it was for the service in part 1 of the series.

<target name="glassfish-deploy-remote" depends="clean, dist"
        description="Build distribution (WAR) and deploy to GlassFish">
    <exec failonerror="true" executable="cmd" description="asadmin deploy">
        <arg value="/c" />
        <arg value="asadmin --host=[your-client's-glassfish-server-name] 
            --port=[your-client's-glassfish-domain-admin-port]
            --user=admin --passwordfile=pwdfile --secure=false
            deploy --force=true --name=JerseyRESTfulClient
            --contextroot=/JerseyRESTfulClient dist\JerseyRESTfulClient.war" />
    </exec>
</target>

Although the client application does not require any Java code, JSP pages, or Servlets, I chose to use NetBeans’ Web Application project template to create the client and chose to create a .war file to make deployment to GlassFish easier. You could just install the four client files (jQuery, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) on Apache, IIS, or any other web server as a simple HTML site.

08c - Deploy RESTful Web Service Client to Remote GlassFish Server

Deploy Client Application to Remote GlassFish Domain Using Ant Target

Once the application is deployed to GlassFish, you should see the ‘JerseyRESTfulClient’ listed under the Applications tab within the remote server domain.

08d - Deploy RESTful Web Service Client to Remote GlassFish Server

Client Application Deployed to Remote GlassFish Domain

We will call the client application from our browser. The client application, whose files are downloaded and are now local on our machine, will in turn will call the service. The URL to call the client is: http://[your-client's-glassfish-server-name]:[your-client's-glassfish-domain-port]/JerseyRESTfulClient/employees.html (see call-out 1, in the screen-grab, below).

Using Firefox with Firebug, we can observe a few important items once the results are displayed (see the screen-grab, below):

The four client files (jQuery, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) are cached after the first time the client URL loads, but the jQuery Ajax service call is never cached (call-out 2);
All the client application files are loaded from one domain, while the service is called from another domain (call-out 3);
The ‘parseRequest’ callback function in the JSONP response payload, wraps the JSON data (call-out 4).

Employee List Displayed by Client Application in Firefox

The JSONP returned by the service to the client (abridged for length):

parseResponse({"vEmployee":[{"addressLine1":"4350 Minute Dr.","businessEntityID":"1","city":"Newport Hills","countryRegionName":"United States","emailAddress":"ken0@adventure-works.com","emailPromotion":"0","firstName":"Ken","jobTitle":"Chief Executive Officer","lastName":"Sánchez","middleName":"J","phoneNumber":"697-555-0142","phoneNumberType":"Cell","postalCode":"98006","stateProvinceName":"Washington"},{"addressLine1":"7559 Worth Ct.","businessEntityID":"2","city":"Renton","countryRegionName":"United States","emailAddress":"terri0@adventure-works.com","emailPromotion":"1","firstName":"Terri","jobTitle":"Vice President of Engineering","lastName":"Duffy","middleName":"Lee","phoneNumber":"819-555-0175","phoneNumberType":"Work","postalCode":"98055","stateProvinceName":"Washington"},{...}]})

The JSON passed to the parseResponse(data) function’s data argument (abridged for length):

{"vEmployee":[{"addressLine1":"4350 Minute Dr.","businessEntityID":"1","city":"Newport Hills","countryRegionName":"United States","emailAddress":"ken0@adventure-works.com","emailPromotion":"0","firstName":"Ken","jobTitle":"Chief Executive Officer","lastName":"Sánchez","middleName":"J","phoneNumber":"697-555-0142","phoneNumberType":"Cell","postalCode":"98006","stateProvinceName":"Washington"},{"addressLine1":"7559 Worth Ct.","businessEntityID":"2","city":"Renton","countryRegionName":"United States","emailAddress":"terri0@adventure-works.com","emailPromotion":"1","firstName":"Terri","jobTitle":"Vice President of Engineering","lastName":"Duffy","middleName":"Lee","phoneNumber":"819-555-0175","phoneNumberType":"Work","postalCode":"98055","stateProvinceName":"Washington"},{...}]}

Firebug also allows us to view the JSON in a more structured and object-oriented view:

Employee List Displayed by Client Application in Firefox (showing JSON in Firebug)

Firefox Showing formatted JSON Data Using Firebug

Conclusion

We have successfully built and deployed a RESTful web service to one GlassFish domain, capable of returning JSONP. We have also built and deployed an HTML client to another GlassFish domain, capable of calling the service and displaying the JSONP. The service and client in this example have very minimal functionality. However, the service can easily be scaled to include multiple entities and RESTful services. The client’s capability can be expanded to perform a full array of CRUD operations on the database, through the RESTful web service(s).

AJAX, Apache Ant, Domain, EclipseLink, GlassFish, HTML, jackson, Java, JAVA EE, JavaScript, JAX-RS, JAXB, JDBC, jersey-json, JPA, jQuery, JSON, JSON with Padding, JSONP, JSONwithPadding, Linux, NetBeans, Persistence, REST, RESTful Web Services, same origin policy, SQL, SQL Server, SQL2008R2, Ubuntu, Virtual Machine, VirtualBox, VM

4 Comments

Returning JSONP from Java EE RESTful Web Services Using jQuery, Jersey, and GlassFish – Part 1 of 2

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Java Development, Software Development on October 1, 2012

Create a Jersey-specific Java EE RESTful web service and an HTML-based client to call the service and display JSONP. Test and deploy the service and the client to different remote instances of GlassFish.

Background

According to Wikipedia, JSONP (JSON with Padding) is a complement to the base JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data format. It provides a method to request data from a server in a different domain, something prohibited by typical web browsers because of the same origin policy.

Jersey is the open source, production quality, JAX-RS (JSR 311) Reference Implementation for building RESTful Web services on the Java platform according to jersey.java.net. Jersey is a core component of GlassFish.

What do these two things have in common? One of the key features of Jersey is its ability to return JSONP. According to Oracle’s documentation, using Jersey, if an instance is returned by a resource method and the most acceptable media type is one of application/javascript, application/x-javascript, text/ecmascript, application/ecmascript or text/jscript then the object that is contained by the instance is serialized as JSON (if supported, using the application/json media type) and the result is wrapped around a JavaScript callback function, whose name by default is “callback”. Otherwise, the object is serialized directly according to the most acceptable media type. This means that an instance can be used to produce the media types application/json, application/xml in addition to application.

There is plenty of opinions on the Internet about the pros and cons of using JSONP over other alternatives to get around the same origin policy. Regardless of the cons, JSONP, with the help of Jersey, provides the ability to call a RESTful web service from a remote server, without a lot of additional coding or security considerations.

Objectives

Similar to GlassFish, Jersey is also tightly integrated into NetBeans. NetBeans provides the option to use Jersey-specific features when creating RESTful web services. According to documentation, NetBeans will generate a web.xml deployment descriptor and to register the RESTful services in that deployment descriptor instead of generating an application configuration class. In this post, we will create Jersey-specific RESTful web service from a database using NetBeans. The service will return JSONP in addition to JSON and XML.

In addition to creating the RESTful web service, in part 2 of this series, we will create a simple web client to display the JSONP returned by the service. There are many options available for creating clients, depending on your development platform and project requirements. We will keep it simple – no complex compiled code, just simple JavaScript using Ajax and jQuery, the well-known JavaScript library.

We will host the RESTful web service on one GlassFish domain, running on a Windows box, along with the SQL Server database. We will host the client on a second GlassFish domain, running on an Ubuntu Linux VM using Oracle’s VM VirtualBox. This is a different machine than the service was installed on. When opened by the end-user in a web browser, the client files, including the JavaScript file that calls the service, are downloaded to the end-users machine. This will simulate a typical cross-domain situation where a client application needs to consume RESTful web services from a remote source. This is not allowed by the same origin policy, but overcome by returning JSONP to the client, which wraps the JSON payload in a function call.

Demonstration

Here are the high-level steps we will walk-through in this two-part series of posts:

In a new RESTful web service web application project,
1. Create an entity class from the Adventure Works database using EclipseLink;
2. Create a Jersey-specific RESTful web service using the entity class using Jersey and JAXB;
3. Add a new method to service, which leverages Jersey and Jackson’s abilities to return JSONP;
4. Deploy the RESTful web service to a remote instance of GlassFish, using Apache Ant;
5. Test the RESTful web service using cURL.
In a new RESTful web service client web application project,
1. Create a simple HTML client using jQuery and Ajax to call the RESTful web service;
2. Add jQuery functionality to parse and display the JSONP returned by the service;
3. Deploy the client to a separate remote instance of GlassFish using Apache Ant;
4. Test the client’s ability to call the service across domains and display JSONP.

To demonstrate the example in this post, I have the follow applications installed, configured, and running in my development environment:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (www.microsoft.com/sqlserver)
Microsoft’s Adventure Works 2008 R2 Sample Database (msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com)
Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/aa937724.aspx)
NetBeans 7.2 Open Source IDE (netbeans.org)
Apache Any 1.82 (installed with NetBeans or downloaded separately from ant.apache.org)
GlassFish 3.2.2.2 Open Source Edition Application Server (installed with NetBeans or downloaded separately from glassfish.java.net)

For the database we will use the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Adventure Works database I’ve used in the past few posts. For more on the Adventure Works database, see my post, ‘Convert VS 2010 Database Project to SSDT and Automate Publishing with Jenkins – Part 1/3’. Not using SQL Server? Once you’ve created your data source, most remaining steps in this post are independent of the database you choose, be it MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Derby, etc.

For a full explanation of the use of Jersey and Jackson JSON Processor, for non-Maven developers, as this post demonstrates, see this link to the Jersey 1.8 User Guide. It discusses several relevant topics to this article: Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), JSON serialization, and natural JSON notation (or, convention). See this link from the User Guide, for more on natural JSON notation. Note this example does not implement natural JSON notation functionality.

Creating the RESTful Web Service

New NetBeans Web Application Project
Create a new Java Web Application project in NetBeans. Name the project. I named mine ‘JerseyRESTfulService’. The choice of GlassFish server and domain where the project will be deployed is unimportant. We will use Apache Ant to deploy the service when we finish the building the project. By default, I chose my local instance of GlassFish, for testing purposes.

Create a New Web Application Project in NetBeans

Name and Location of New Web Application Project

Server and Settings of New Web Application Project

Optional Frameworks to Include in New Web Application Project

View of New Web Application Project in NetBeans

Create Entity Class from Database
Right-click on the project again and select ‘New’ -> ‘Other…’. From the list of Categories, select ‘Persistence’. From the list of Persistence choices, choose ‘Entity Classes from Database’. Click Next.

Create Entity Classes from the Database

Before we can choose which database table we want from the Adventure Works database to create entity class, we must create a connection to the database – a SQL Server Data Source. Click on the Data Source drop down and select ‘New Data Source…’. Give a Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) name for the data source. I called mine ‘AdventureWorks_HumanResources’. Click on the ‘Database Connection’ drop down menu, select ‘New Database Connection…’.

Select Database Tables for Entity Classes (No Data Source Exists Yet)

02c - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Create and Name a New Data Source

This starts the ‘New Connection Wizard’. The first screen, ‘Locate Driver’, is where we point NetBeans to the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server Driver. Locate the sqljdbc4.jar file.

02d - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Add the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server Jar File

On the next screen, ‘Customize the Connection’, input the required SQL Server information. The host is the machine your instance of SQL Server is installed on, such as ‘localhost’. The instance is the name of the SQL Server instance in which the Adventure Works database is installed, such as ‘Development’. Once you complete the form, click ‘Test Connection’. If it doesn’t succeed, check your settings, again. Keep in mind, ‘localhost’ will only work if your SQL Server instance is local to your GlassFish server instance where the service will be deployed. If it is on a separate server, make sure to use that server’s IP address or domain name.

02e - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Configure New Database Connection

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the SQL Server Data Source forces you to select a single database schema. On the ‘Choose Database Schema’ screen, select the ‘HumanResources’ schema. The database tables you will be able to reference from you entity classes are limited to just this schema, when using this data source. To reference other schemas, you will need to create more data sources.

02f - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Select Human Resources Database Schema

Back in the ‘New Entity Classes from Database’ window, you will now have the ‘AdventureWorks’ data source selected as the Data Source. After a few seconds of processing, all ‘Available Tables’ within the ‘HumanResources’ schema are displayed. Choose the ‘vEmployee(view)’. A database view is a virtual database table. Note the Entity ID message. We will need to do an extra step later on, to use the entity class built from the database view.

02g - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Choice of Database Tables and Views from Human Resources Schema

02h - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Choose the ‘vEmployee(view)’ Database View

On the next screen, ‘Entity Classes’, in the ‘New Entity Classes from Database’ window, select or create the Package to place the individual entity classes into. I chose to call mine ‘entities’.

02i-create-entity-classes-from-the-database

Select/Create the Package Location for the Entity Class

On the next screen, ‘Mapping Options’, choose ‘Fully Qualified Database Table Names’. Without this option selected, I have had problems trying to make the RESTful web services function properly. This is also the reason I chose to create the entity classes first, and then create the RESTful web services, separately. NetBeans has an option that combines these two tasks into a single step, by choosing ‘RESTful Web Services from Database’. However, the ‘Fully Qualified Database Table Names’ option is not available on the equivalent screen, using that process (at least in my version of NetBeans 7.2). I prefer the two-step approach.

02j - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Select the ‘Fully Qualified Database Table Names’ Mapping Options

Click finished. You have successfully created the SQL Server data source and entity classes.

02k - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Project View of New VEmployee Entity Class

If you recall, I mentioned a problem with the entity class we created from the database view. To avoid an error when you build and deploy your project to GlassFish, we need to make a small change to the VEmployee.java entity class. Entity classes need a unique identifier, a primary key (or, Entity ID) identified. Since this entity class was built from database view, as opposed to database table, it lacks a primary key. To fix, annotate the businessEntityID field with @Id. This indicates that businessEntityID is the primary key (Entity ID) for this class. The field, businessEntityID, must contain unique values, for this to work properly. NetBeans will make the suggested correction for you, if you allow it.

02l - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Fix the Entity Class’s Missing Primary Key (Entity ID)

02m - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Fix the Entity Class’s Missing Primary Key (Entity ID)

02n - Create Entity Classes from the Database

Entity Class With Primary Key (Entity ID)

The JPA Persistence Unit is found in the ‘persistence.xml’ file in the ‘Configuration Files’ folder. This file describes the Persistence Unit (PU). The PU serves to register the project’s persistable entity class, which are referred to by JPA as ‘managed classes’.

02o - Create Entity Classes from the Database

View of New JPA Persistence Unit

The data source we created, which will be deployed to GlassFish, is referred to as a JDBC Resource and JDBC Connection Pool. This information is stored in the ‘glassfish-resources.xml’.

02p - Create Entity Classes from the Database

View of New JDBC Resource and JDBC Connection Pool

Create RESTful Web Service
Now that have a SQL Server Data Source and our entity class, we will create the RESTful web service. Right-click on the project and select ‘New’ -> ‘Other…’ -> ‘Persistence’ -> ‘RESTful Web Services from ‘Entity Classes’. You will see the entity class we just created, from which to choose. Add the entity class.

Create RESTful Web Services from Entity Classes

Choose from List of Available Entity Classes

04c - Create RESTful Web Services from Entity Classes

Choose the VEmployee Entity Class

On the next screen, select or create the Resource Package to store the service class in; I called mine ‘service’. Select the ‘Use Jersey Specific Features’ option.

04d - Create RESTful Web Services from Entity Classes

Select/Create the Service’s Package Location and Select the Option to ‘Use Jersey Specific Features’

That’s it. You now have a Jersey-specific RESTful web service and the corresponding Enterprise Bean and Façade service class in the project.

04e - Create RESTful Web Services from Entity Classes

Project View of New RESTful Web Service and Associated Files

NetBeans provides an easy way to test the RESTful web services, locally. Right-click on the ‘RESTful Web Services’ project folder within the main project, and select ‘Test RESTful Web Services’. Select the first option, ‘Locally Generated Test Client’, in the ‘Configure REST Test Client’ pop-up window. NetBeans will use the locally configured GlassFish instance to deploy and test the service.

NetBeans opens a web browser window and display the RESTful URIs (Universal Resource Identifier) for the service in a tree structure. There is a parent URI, ‘entities.vemployee’. Selecting this URI will return all employees from the vEmployee database view. The ‘entities.vemployee’ URI has additional children URIs grouped under it, including ‘{id}’, ‘count’, and ‘{from/to}’, each mapped to separate methods in the service class.

Click on the ‘{id}’ URI. Choose the HTTP ‘GET()’ request method from the drop-down, enter ‘1’ for ‘id’, and click the ‘Test’ button. The service should return a status of ‘200 (OK)’, along with xml output containing information on all the Adventure Works employees. Change the MIME type to ‘application/json’. This should return the same result, formatted as JSON. Congratulation, the RESTful web services have just returned data to your browser from the SQL Server Adventure Works database, using the entity classes and data source you created.

Are they URIs or URLs? I found this excellent post that does a very good job explaining the difference between the URL (how to get there) and the URI (the resource), which is part of the URL.

04f - Create RESTful Web Services from Entity Classes

Test the RESTful Web Service Locally in NetBeans (XML Response Shown)

04g - Create RESTful Web Services from Entity Classes

Test the RESTful Web Service Locally in NetBeans (JSON Response Shown)

Using Jersey for JSONP
GlassFish comes with the jersey-core.jar installed. In order to deliver JSONP, we also need to import and use com.sun.jersey.api.json.JSONWithPadding package from jersey-json.jar. I downloaded and installed version 1.8. You can download the jar from several locations. I chose to download it from www.java2.com. You can also download from the download.java.net Maven2 repository.

Add the Jersey JSON Jar File to the Project

The com.sun.jersey.api.json.JSONWithPadding package has dependencies two Jackson JSON Processor jars. You will also need to download the necessary Jackson JSON Processor jars. They are the jackson-core-asl-1.9.8.jar and jackson-mapper-asl-1.9.8.jar. At the time of this post, I downloaded the latest 1.9.8 versions from the grepcode.com Maven2 repository.

Add the two Jackson JSON Processor Jar Files to the Project

Create New JSONP Method

NetBeans creates several default methods in the VEmployeeFacadeREST class. One of those is the findRange method. The method accepts two integer parameters, from and to. The parameter values are extracted from the URL (JAX-RS @Path annotation). The parameters are called path parameters (@PathParam). The method returns a List of VEmployee objects (List<VEmployee>). The findRange method can return two MIME types, XML and JSON (@Produces). The List<VEmployee> is serialized in either format and returned to the caller.

@GET
@Path("{from}/{to}")
@Produces({"application/xml", "application/json"})
public List<VEmployee> findRange(@PathParam("from") Integer from, @PathParam("to") Integer to) {
    return super.findRange(new int[]{from, to});
}

Neither XML nor JSON will do, we want to return JSONP. Well, using the JSONWithPadding class we can do just that. We will copy and re-write the findRange method to return JSONP. The new findRangeJsonP method looks similar to the findRange. However instead of returning a List<VEmployee>, the new method returns an instance of the JSONWithPadding class. Since List<E> extends Collection<E>, we make the same call as the first method, then cast the List<VEmployee> to Collection<VEmployee>. We then wrap the Collection in a GenericEntity<T>, which extends Object. The GenericEntity<T> represents a response entity of a generic type T. This is used to instantiate a new instance of the JSONWithPadding class, using the JSONWithPadding(Object jsonSource, String callbackName) constructor. The JSONWithPadding instance, which contains serialized JSON wrapped with the callback function, is returned to the client.

@GET
@Path("{from}/{to}/jsonp")
@Produces({"application/javascript"})
public JSONWithPadding findRangeJsonP(@PathParam("from") Integer from,
        @PathParam("to") Integer to, @QueryParam("callback") String callback) {
    Collection<VEmployee> employees = super.findRange(new int[]{from, to});
    return new JSONWithPadding(new GenericEntity<Collection<VEmployee>>(employees) {
    }, callback);
}

We have added a two new parts to the ‘from/to’ URL. First, we added ‘/jsonp’ to the end to signify the new findRangeJsonP method is to be called, instead of the original findRange method. Secondly, we added a new ‘callback’ query parameter (@QueryParam). The ‘callback’ parameter will pass in the name of the callback function, which will then be returned with the JSONP payload. The new URL format is as follows:

http://[your-service's-glassfish-server-name]:[your-service's-glassfish-domain-port]/JerseyRESTfulService/webresources/entities.vemployee/{from}/{to}/jsonp?callback={callback}

Add the Following Jersey JSONP Method to the RESTful Web Service Class

Adding the Method Requires Importing the ‘JSONWithPadding’ Library

Deployment to GlassFish
To deploy the RESTful web service to GlassFish, run the following Apache Ant target. The target first calls the clean and dist targets to build the .war file, Then, the target calls GlassFish’s asadmin deploy command. It specifies the remote GlassFish server, admin port, admin user, admin password (in the password file), secure or insecure connection, the name of the container, and the name of the .war file to be deployed. Note that the server is different for the service than it will be for the client in part 2 of the series.

<target name="glassfish-deploy-remote" depends="clean, dist"
        description="Build distribution (WAR) and deploy to GlassFish">
    <exec failonerror="true" executable="cmd" description="asadmin deploy">
        <arg value="/c" />
        <arg value="asadmin --host=[your-service's-glassfish-server-name] 
            --port=[your-service's-glassfish-domain-admin-port]
            --user=admin --passwordfile=pwdfile --secure=false
            deploy --force=true --name=JerseyRESTfulService
            --contextroot=/JerseyRESTfulServicedist\JerseyRESTfulService.war" />
    </exec>
</target>

Deploy RESTful Web Service to Remote GlassFish Server Using Apache Ant Target

In GlassFish, you should see the several new elements: 1) JerseyRESTfulService Application, 2) AdventureWorks_HumanResources JDBC Resource, 3) microsoft_sql_AdventureWorks_aw_devPool JDBC Connection Pool. These are the elements that were deployed by Ant. Also note, 4) the RESTful web service class, VEmployeeFacadeREST, is an EJB StatelessSessionBean.

08b - Deploy RESTful Web Service to Remote GlassFish Server

RESTful Web Service Deployed to Remote GlassFish Server

Test the Service with cURL
What is the easiest way to test our RESTful web service without a client? Answer, cURL, the free open-source URL tool. According to the website, “curl is a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, SMTPS, Telnet and TFTP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.”

To use cURL, download and unzip the cURL package to your system’s Programs directory. Add the cURL directory path to your system’s PATH environmental variable. Better yet, create a CURL_HOME environmental variable and add that reference to the PATH variable, as I did. Adding the the cURL directory path to PATH allows you to call the cURL.exe application, directly from the command line.

Add the cURL Directory Path to the ‘PATH’ Environmental Variable

With cURL installed, we can call the RESTful web service from the command line. To test the service’s new method, call it with the following cURL command:

curl -i -H "Accept: application/x-javascript" -X GET http://[your-service's-glassfish-server-name]:[your-service's-glassfish-domain-port]/JerseyRESTfulService/webresources/entities.vemployee/1/3/jsonp?callback=parseResponse

Using cURL to Call RESTful Web Service and Return JSONP

Using cURL is great for testing the RESTful web service. However, the command line results are hard to read. I recommend copy the cURL results into NotePad++ with the JSON Viewer Plugin. Like the NotePad++ XML plugin, the JSON plugin will format the JSONP and provide a tree view of the data structure.

Notepad++ Displaying JSONP Using the JSON Viewer Plugin

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have created and deployed a RESTful web service with a method capable of returning JSONP. In part 2 of this series, we will create a client to call the RESTful web service and display the JSONP response payload. There are many options available for creating clients, depending on your development platform and project requirements. We will keep it simple – no complex, compiled code, just simple JavaScript using Ajax and jQuery, the well-known JavaScript library.

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Connecting Java EE RESTful Web Services to Microsoft SQL Server Using NetBeans and GlassFish

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Java Development, Software Development on September 15, 2012

Connecting Java EE RESTful web services, hosted on GlassFish, to Microsoft SQL Server – a high level overview. Demonstrate the creation of a Web Application project in NetBeans, including a SQL Server data source, entity classes from a SQL database, and RESTful web services. Show how to test and deploy the project to GlassFish.

Introduction

In a previous post, Connecting Java EE to SQL Server with Microsoft’s JDBC Driver 4.0, I demonstrated how Microsoft’s JDBC Driver 4.0 can connect Java-based RESTful web services to Microsoft SQL Server. In a more recent post, Calling Microsoft SQL Server Stored Procedures from a Java Application Using JDBC, I demonstrated the use of JDBC to call stored procedures from a Java application. In this post, I am going to offer a high-level, end-to-end overview on how to create and connect Java EE RESTful web services, hosted on GlassFish, to SQL Server. The goals of post are:

Demonstrate the use of Microsoft’s JDBC Driver 4.0 to connect a Java-based application to SQL Server 2008 R2;
Demonstrate the use of NetBeans to:
- Create a SQL Server Data Source;
- Create entity classes from the SQL Server database using the SQL Server Data Source;
- Create RESTful web services using JAX-RS, which communicate with database, through the entity classes;
- Compile and deploy the data source, entities, and services to GlassFish;
Test the RESTful Web Services locally in NetBeans, and once deployed, in GlassFish.

Setting up the Post’s Example

To demonstrate the example in this post, I have the follow applications installed, configured, and running in my development environment:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (www.microsoft.com/sqlserver)
Microsoft’s Adventure Works 2008 R2 Sample Database (msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com)
Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/aa937724.aspx)
NetBeans 7.2 Open Source IDE (netbeans.org)
Apache Any 1.82 (installed with NetBeans or downloaded separately from ant.apache.org)
GlassFish 3.2.2.2 Open Source Edition Application Server (installed with NetBeans or downloaded separately from glassfish.java.net)

If you have any questions about installing and configuring the Adventure Works database, please refer to my post, Convert VS 2010 Database Project to SSDT and Automate Publishing with Jenkins – Part 1/3. The post takes you through creating a SQL Server 2008 R2 instance (entitled ‘Development’), installing the Adventure Works database, and creating a database user (‘aw-dev’). Also, refer to my earlier post, Connecting Java EE to SQL Server with Microsoft’s JDBC Driver 4.0, for directions on installing the Microsoft JDBC driver in the lib directory of GlassFish. This is necessary before following along with this demonstration.

Note, since I have NetBeans, SQL Server, and GlassFish all installed on a single computer, the URLs in several of the screen-grabs switch between ‘localhost’ and my computer’s actual name. Both references are interchangeable.

The Demonstration

Here are the high-level steps I will walk-through in this post:

Confirm the SQL Server instance, database, and user are functioning properly;
Create a new Web Application project in NetBeans;
Create the SQL Server data source in the project;
Create entity classes from the SQL Server database;
Create RESTful web services using the entity classes;
Test the web services locally in NetBeans;
Build and deploy the project to GlassFish;
Test the web services on GlassFish.

SQL Server

Using Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio, Quest’s Toad for SQL, or similar IDE, confirm the ‘Development’ instance (or whatever you have named your instance) of SQL Server 2008 R2 is running. Confirm the Adventure Works database is installed in that instance. Lastly, confirm the ‘aw_dev’ user can connect to the Adventure Works database and view and interact with all the database objects. Confirming these items will elevate many problems you might otherwise encounter when creating the data source, next.

View of the SQL Server Instance from SSMS. Note the : 1) Server, Instance, User, 2) Database, and 3) Schema

Create New Web Application Project

Create a new Java Web Application project in NetBeans. Name the project whatever you would like; I named mine ‘JdbcSqlWebSrvTest’. Select the correct GlassFish server instance and GlassFish domain where the project will be deployed. I am deploying my project to the default ‘domain1’ domain.

Creating a New Java Web Application Project in NetBeans - 02

Choose the Web Application Project-Type in NetBeans

Creating a New Java Web Application Project in NetBeans - 03

Provide a Project Name and Location

Creating a New Java Web Application Project in NetBeans - 04

Select the Target GlassFish Server and Domain Where the Project Will be Installed

Creating a New Java Web Application Project in NetBeans - 05

Include any Frameworks You Will Use with the Project

Creating a New Java Web Application Project in NetBeans - 06

View of the New Web Application Project in NetBeans

Create SQL Server Data Source and Entity Classes from the Database

Right-click on the project again and select ‘New’ -> ‘Other…’. From the list of Categories, select ‘Persistence’. From the list of Persistence choices, choose ‘Entity Classes from Database’. Click Next.

Creating New Entity Classes from a Database - 01

Choose ‘Entity Classes from Database’

Before we can choose which database tables we want from the Adventure Works database to create entity classes, we must create a connection to the database – a SQL Server Data Source. Click on the Data Source drop down and select ‘New Data Source…’. Give a Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) name for the data source. I called mine ‘AdventureWorks’. Click on the ‘Database Connection’ dropdown, select ‘New Database Connection…’.

Creating New Entity Classes from a Database - 02

Database Tables View Before Data Source is Created

Creating a New Datasource for Entity Classes from a Database - 01

Name the Data Source

This starts the ‘New Connection Wizard’. The first screen, ‘Locate Driver’, is where we point the will instruct NetBeans to use the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server Driver. Locate the sqljdbc4.jar file.

Creating a New Datasource for Entity Classes from a Database - 02

Locate the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server Driver .jar File

Creating a New Datasource for Entity Classes from a Database - 03

Provide the SQL Server Adventure Works Database Connection Information

Creating a New Datasource for Entity Classes from a Database - 04

Select the ‘HumanResources’ Database Schema

Creating a New Datasource for Entity Classes from a Database - 05

New Data Source Complete with JNDI Name and Database Connection Created

Back in the ‘New Entity Classes from Database’ window, you will now have the ‘AdventureWorks’ data source selected as the Data Source. After a few seconds of processing, all ‘Available Tables’ within the ‘HumanResources’ schema are displayed. Choose the four tables shown in the screen-grab, below. Actually, two are database tables and two are virtual tables, called database ‘views’. We will need to do an extra step later on, to use the two entity classes built from the database views.

Creating New Entity Classes from a Database - 03A

Retrieving all the ‘HumanResources’ Schema Database Tables and Views

Creating New Entity Classes from a Database - 03B

All the ‘HumanResources’ Schema Database Tables and Views Available

Creating New Entity Classes from a Database - 04

Selecting the Database Views Throws a Warning Regarding no Entity IDs (Primary Keys)

On the next screen, ‘Entity Classes’, in the ‘New Entity Classes from Database’ window, give a package name to place the individual entity classes into. I chose to call mine ‘entityclasses’.

Creating New Entity Classes from a Database - 05

Provide the Name of the Package Where the Entity Classes Will be Created

Creating New Entity Classes from a Database - 06

Select the ‘Fully Qualified Database Table Names’ Option

Click finished. You have successfully created the SQL Server data source and entity classes.

The data source we created, which will be deployed to GlassFish, is referred to as a JDBC Resource and a JDBC Connection Pool. This JDBC information is stored in the ‘glassfish-resources.xml’ file by NetBeans.

New Glassfish JDBC Connection Pool and Resource - Source (glassfish-resources.xml)

New GlassFish JDBC Connection Pool and JDBC Resource Contained in the glassfish-resources.xml File

The JPA Persistence Unit is found in the ‘persistence.xml’ file in the ‘Configuration Files’ folder. This file describes the Persistence Unit (PU). The PU serves to register the project’s four persistable entity classes, which are referred to by JPA as managed classes.

JPA Configuration - Design View (persistence.xml)

persistence.xml Design View

JPA Configuration - Source (persistence.xml)

persistence.xml Source View

RESTful Web Services from Entity Classes

Now that have a SQL Server Data Source and our entity classes, we will create the RESTful web services. Right-click on the project and select ‘New’ -> ‘Other…’ -> ‘Persistence’ -> ‘RESTful Web Services from ‘Entity Classes’. You will see a list of four entity classes we just created, from which to choose. Add all four entity classes.

Creating New RESTful Web Service from Entity Classes - 01

Creating the New RESTful Web Service from Four Entity Classes

Creating New RESTful Web Service from Entity Classes - 02

Add the Four Entity Classes

On the next screen, give a name for Resource Package to store the service classes in; I called mine ‘service’. That’s it; you now have four RESTful web services and the corresponding Enterprise Beans and Façade service classes. The service class sits between the RESTful web service and the entity class.

Creating New RESTful Web Service from Entity Classes - 03

Provide a Package Location to Place the RESTful Web Service Classes Into

Click finished. You have successfully created the RESTful web services.

Web Application Project with Entities and Services Added - 01

View of Web Application Project with Entity Classes and RESTful Web Services Added

Web Application Project with Entities and Services Added - 02

View of Web Application Project with Entity Classes and RESTful Web Services Added

Adding a Primary Key to Entity Classes

If you recall, I mentioned a problem with the two entity classes we created from the database views. To avoid an error when you build and deploy your project to GlassFish, we need to make a small change to the VEmployee.java and VEmployeeDepartment.java entity classes. Entity classes need a unique identifier, a primary key (or, Entity ID) identified. Since these two entity classes are built from database views, as opposed to database tables, they lack a primary key. To fix this, annotate the ‘businessEntityID’ field with ‘@Id’ in each class. This indicates that ‘businessEntityID’ is the primary key (Entity ID) for this class. The field, ‘businessEntityID’, must contain unique values, for this to work properly. NetBeans will make the suggested correction for you, if you allow it.

Fix Entity Id Error in View Entity Classes - 01

NetBeans Highlights the Entity Id Error in Two View-Based Entity Classes

Fix Entity Id Error in View Entity Classes - 02

Select the ‘businessEntityID’ Field as the Primary Key

Fix Entity Id Error in View Entity Classes - 03

View of Entity Class with ‘@Id’ Annotation Added

Test RESTful Web Services Locally in NetBeans

Test RESTful Web Service in NetBeans - 01

Choose the Local Test Client Option

NetBeans will open a web browser window and displays the RESTful URI (Universal Resource Identifier) for the services in a tree structure. There are four primary URIs, corresponding to the four services. Each primary URI has additional child URIs grouped under them. Are they URIs or URLs? I found this excellent post that does a very good job explaining the difference between the URL (how to get there) and the URI (the resource), which is part of the URL.

Test RESTful Web Service in NetBeans - 02

You May Get an ActiveX Warning When Using IE to Test the RESTful Web Services

Test RESTful Web Service in NetBeans - 03

View of all the RESTful Web Services Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs)

Click on the ‘entityclasses.employee’ URI. Choose the HTTP ‘GET()’ request method from the drop-down and click the ‘Test’ button. The service should return a status of ‘200 (OK)’, along with xml output containing information on all the Adventure Works employees. Congratulation, the RESTful web services have just returned data to your browser from the SQL Server Adventure Works database, using the entity classes and data source you created.

Test RESTful Web Service in NetBeans - 04

All Employees Being Successfully Retrieved from the Adventure Works Database

Click on the other URIs to familiarize yourself with the various default resources. Test the employee ‘from/to’ URI by inputting two parameters, test the ‘count’ URI, and try changing the MIME type where applicable from XML to JSON and observe the results.

Test RESTful Web Service in NetBeans - 05

A Single Employee Being Successfully Retrieved from the Adventure Works Database Using Input Parameter

Test RESTful Web Service in NetBeans - 06

Count of All Employees Being Successfully Retrieved from the Adventure Works Database

WADL

Note the link in the upper right corner of the above screens, labeled WADL: ‘http://[your_server_path]/JdbcSqlWebSrvTest/webresources/application.wadl’

The WADL (Web Application Description Language) file is the machine-readable XML description of the RESTful web service(s). The WADL file is to RESTful web services, as the WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) file is to non-RESTful, SOA-/SOAP-oriented web services. The WADL provides all the information you need to understand to the various RESTful web service’s resources, and how to call them using their URIs. According to Wikipedia, in the WADL file, ‘the service is described using a set of resource elements. Each resource has param elements to describe the inputs, and method elements which describe the request and response of a resource. The request element specifies how to represent the input, what types are required and any specific HTTP headers that are required. The response describes the representation of the service’s response, as well as any fault information, to deal with errors.’ You can download the WADL file (application.wadl), and review it in an XML-friendly viewer such as Notepad++.

View of the RESTful Web Services’ WADL File – application.wadl

Deploy Project to GlassFish

Now that the RESTful web services are working properly from within NetBeans, we can deploy them to GlassFish. To deploy the project to GlassFish, right-click on the main project icon in the Projects tab and select ‘Clean and Build’. Once the project builds successfully, right-click again and select ‘Deploy’. This will instruct Apache Ant to deploy the project as a .war file to GlassFish, using the project’s default Ant deploy task. The SQL Server data source will also be installed into GlassFish.

Once the deployment is complete, switch to GlassFish and refresh the home page if necessary. Under the ‘Applications’ item on the left-hand navigation menu, you should see a new application with the same name as your project, ‘JdbcSqlWebSrvTest’.

GlassFish 01 - Prior to Deploying New Application

Default View of GlassFish Domain Prior to Deploying the New Web Application

GlassFish 02 - New Application Deployed to GlassFish

New Web Application and JDBC Resource and Pool Deployed Successfully to GlassFish

Also, under the ‘JDBC’ -> ‘JDBC Resources’ item, you should see a resource with the same name as the data source you created in NetBeans, ‘AdventureWorks’. Under the ‘JDBC’ -> ‘JDBC Connection Pools’, you should see a pool entitled ‘microsoft_sql_AdventureWorks_aw_devPool’. The JDBC Resource, ‘AdventureWorks’, is linked to this pool. The pool is a ‘javax.sql.DataSource’ resource type, which references the ‘com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDataSource’. This data source is identical to the data source you built in NetBeans.

GlassFish 03 - New Datasource (Resource) Deployed to GlassFish

New JDBC Resource Successfully Deployed to GlassFish

New JDBC Connection Pool Successfully Deployed to GlassFish

Test Web Services on GlassFish

To test the RESTful web services from GlassFish, begin by clicking on the ‘JdbcSqlWebSrvTest’ application, under ‘Applications’ menu item. On the Applications page, click on the ‘Launch’ action link. GlassFish open a new web browser window, and presents you with two ‘Web Application Links’, one link is HTTP and the other, HTTPS. Click on the HTTP link. This should display the default index.jsp page’s ‘Hello World!’ message.

Test RESTful Web Service in GlassFish - 01

Default Response from Application

To call the service, append the current URL to match the resource URIs you used when testing the services in NetBeans. For example, to display all the employees again like you did in NetBeans, append the current URL, http://%5Byour_server_name%5D:%5Bport%5D/JdbcSqlWebSrvTest/, to include the following:

http://%5Byour_server_name%5D:%5Bport%5D/JdbcSqlWebSrvTest/webresources/entityclasses.employee

This URI should return the same xml content you observed when testing this same URI locally in NetBeans.

Test RESTful Web Service in GlassFish - 02

All Employees Being Successfully Retrieved from the Adventure Works Database

As another test, append the URI to also include the Id of a single employee, as follows:

http://%5Byour_server_name%5D:%5Bport%5D/JdbcSqlWebSrvTest/webresources/entityclasses.employee/2

This should cut the amount of data returned from the Adventure Works database to a single employee record.

Test RESTful Web Service in GlassFish - 03

A Single Employee Being Successfully Retrieved from the Adventure Works Database Using a Parameter

One last test, remove the number two from the URI and add the word ‘count’, as follows:

http://%5Byour_server_name%5D:%5Bport%5D/JdbcSqlWebSrvTest/webresources/entityclasses.employee/count

This time, you should see a single integer returned to the browser, representing the count of all employees in the database’s employee table.

Test RESTful Web Service in GlassFish - 04

Count of All Employees Being Successfully Retrieved from the Adventure Works Database

Conclusion

Congratulations, the Java EE RESTful web services have been successfully deployed to GlassFish. The services are connecting to Adventure Works SQL Server database, through the entity classes and data source, and returning data to your web browser! Next step is to create a RESTful web services client application, to display the data returned by the services and/or to perform CRUD operations on the database.

.war, Adventure Works, Connection Pool, Deploy, Entity Classes, GlassFish, JAVA EE, JAX-RS, JDBC, JDBC Resource, JNDI, JPA, NetBeans, Persistence, REST, RESTful Web Services, SQL, SQL Server, SQL2008R2, Web Application, XML

15 Comments

Automated Deployment to GlassFish Using Jenkins CI Server and Apache Ant

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in DevOps, Enterprise Software Development, Java Development, Software Development on May 19, 2012

Use Jenkins and Apace Ant to compile, assemble, test, and deploy a RESTful web service to GlassFish. All source code for this post is available on GitHub. Note GitHub repo reflects updates to project on 10/31/2013.

Jenkins, formally Hudson, is the industry-standard, java-based open-source continuous integration server. According to their website, Jenkins provides over 400 plug-ins to support building and testing almost any type of project. According to Apache, Ant is a Java library and command-line tool whose mission is to drive processes described in build files as targets. This post demonstrates the use of Jenkins and Apache Ant to compile, assemble, unit test, and deploy a Java EE 6 RESTful web service to Oracle’s GlassFish open-source application server.

For the sake of brevity, I have chosen to use the HelloWorld RESTful web service example included with NetBeans. I will use NetBeans to create the project, write the unit tests, and produce an Ant target in the build file. I will not delve deeply into the inner workings of the web service itself since the focus of this post is automation.

System Configuration

This post assumes that you have current versions of NetBeans, JUnit, Jenkins, GlassFish, Ant and Java installed and configured on your Microsoft Windows-based computer. A full installation of NetBeans comes with JUnit, Ant, and GlassFish. At the time of the original post, I was using NetBeans 7.1.2, GlassFish 3.1.2, Jenkins 1.4.6.3, Ant 1.8.3, and JDK 1.7.0_02.

For simplicity, I am using a single development machine for this demonstration, on which all applications are installed. In a true production environment you would most likely have a distributed configuration with GlassFish installed on an application server, Jenkins on a build server, and NetBeans on your development machine. Also, for this post, I am also not using a source-code management (SCM) system, also called a version control system (VCS), such as Subversion or Mercurial, to house the project’s source code. Again, in a production environment, your source-code would be placed on SCM/VCS server.

Both GlassFish and Jenkins are configured by default to run on server port 8080. Since I have both applications installed on the same machine, I have changed Jenkins’ default port to another unused port, 9090. Changing Jenkins’ port is easy to do. If you don’t know how, consult this post or similar.

NetBeans

First, create a new project in NetBeans, by selecting the New Project -> Samples -> Java Web Services, REST: Hello World (Java EE 6), as shown below. Rename the project to HelloGlassFish. When complete, the project, in the Projects tab, should look like the screen-grab, below.

New Project View in NetBeans

JUnit

Next create a unit-test using JUnit, the open-source unit-testing framework. Jenkins will eventually run this test each time the project is built. Creating unit-tests is easy in NetBeans. Select the ‘NameStorageBean.java’ class object, right-click, and select Tools -> Create JUnit Tests… This will create a default ‘NameStorageBeanTest.java’ class object in a new, ‘Test Packages’ directory. Overwrite NameStorageBeanTest.java contents with the follows code. This will create a single unit test we can use to demonstrate JUnit’s integration with Jenkins. You will also notice new test objects in the Project tab.

	package helloworld;

	import javax.ejb.embeddable.EJBContainer;
	import javax.naming.NamingException;
	import org.junit.*;
	import static org.junit.Assert.assertEquals;

	/**
	*
	* @author Gary A. Stafford
	*/
	public class NameStorageBeanTest {

	private NameStorageBean instance = null;
	private EJBContainer container = null;

	public NameStorageBeanTest() {
	}

	@BeforeClass
	public static void setUpClass() throws Exception {
	}

	@AfterClass
	public static void tearDownClass() throws Exception {
	}

	@Before
	public void setUp() throws NamingException {
	container = javax.ejb.embeddable.EJBContainer.createEJBContainer();
	instance = (NameStorageBean) container.getContext().
	lookup("java:global/classes/NameStorageBean");
	}

	@After
	public void tearDown() {
	}

	/**
	* Test of getName method, of class NameStorageBean.
	*/
	@Test
	public void testGetName() throws Exception {
	System.out.println("getName");
	String expResult = "Test";
	instance.setName(expResult);
	String result = instance.getName();
	assertEquals(expResult, result);
	container.close();
	}
	}

view raw NameStorageBeanTest.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Build the project and run the ‘testGetName’ unit-test to make sure it works correctly and the test passes.

Apache Ant

Next, change to the Files tab. Open the ‘build.xml’ file, as shown below. Also, for later reference, note the contents of the ‘HelloGlassFish.war’ and the location of the ‘pwdfile_domain1’ password file.

Place the following Ant target, entitled ‘jenkins-glassfish-deploy’, into the build.xml file, between the end of the commented section and the closing <project/> tag, as shown below.

	<!-- Older style. Not what is in repo on GitHub. -->
	<target name="jenkins-glassfish-deploy"
	description="Clean, build, test and deploy application to GlassFish">
	<antcall target="clean">
	<antcall target="default">
	<antcall target="test">
	<exec failonerror="true" executable="cmd" description="Deploy to GlassFish">
	<arg value="/c" />
	<arg value="asadmin --echo=true --host=localhost --port=4848 --user=admin
	--passwordfile=pwdfile_domain1 --secure=false
	deploy --force=true --name=HelloGlassFish --contextroot=/HelloGlassFish dist\HelloGlassFish.war" />
	</exec>
	</target>

view raw jenkins-glassfish-deploy.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This is the Ant target Jenkins will use to build, test, and deploy the project. The primary ‘jenkins-glassfish-deploy’ target calls three Ant targets using the antcall element. They include clean, default, and test. Each of these Ant targets has dependencies on other Ant targets, which in turn depend on yet other targets – a dependency tree. For example, default depends on dist and javadoc. The test target depends on other targets to build the .war file. If you are not using test to execute unit tests, you can call the test target to build the .war file.

The last part of the ‘jenkins-glassfish-deploy’ target is a little different. It’s an exec (execute) element, which calls asadmin to deploy the project to GlassFish with a series of GlassFish domain-specific parameters. These parameters include the GlassFish domain’s URL and port, the domain’s administrative user and password account info (found in a password file), the location of the .war file to deploy, and destination of the .war within GlassFish. Calling asadmin deploy gives you fine control over the details of how the project is deployed to GlassFish.

The password file, referenced in the target is a simple text file, which stores the password for the user account used to execute the asadmin deploy call. The contents of the file look like:

AS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=Your_Password_Here

This target could be simplified with the depends attribute. Instead of the three antcall elements, you could simply add depends="clean, default, test" to the target element:

	<!-- Older style. Not what is in repo on GitHub. -->
	<target name="jenkins-glassfish-deploy-updated" depends="clean, default, test"
	description="Clean, build, test and deploy application to GlassFish">
	<exec failonerror="true" executable="cmd" description="Deploy to GlassFish">
	<arg value="/c" />
	<arg value="asadmin --echo=true --host=localhost --port=4848 --user=admin
	--passwordfile=pwdfile_domain1 --secure=false
	deploy --force=true --name=HelloGlassFish --contextroot=/HelloGlassFish dist\HelloGlassFish.war" />
	</exec>
	</target>

view raw jenkins-glassfish-deploy-updated.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

According to Oracle, the asadmin utility is used to perform any administrative tasks for GlassFish from the command line. You can use this asadmin utility in place of using the GlassFish Administrator interface. I am able to call asadmin directly because I have added the path to asadmin.bat to the Windows’ environmental variable, PATH. The asadmin.bat file is in the GlassFish bin directory, similar to ‘C:\Program Files\glassfish-3.1.2\glassfish\bin\’.

Jenkins

Switching to Jenkins, create a new Job named HelloGlassFish. In the HelloGlassFish configuration, we need to add two Build steps and one post-build Action. For the first Build step, since we are not using SCM, we will copy the files from the project in the NetBeans workspace to the Jenkins workspace. To do this, add an ‘Execute Windows batch command’ action with code similar to code snippet below, but substituting your own project’s file path. Note, you can substitute the %WORKSPACE% environmental variable for the xcopy destination (see call-out 1 in the below screen-grab). This variable represents the absolute path of the directory assigned to the build as a workspace, according to Jenkins. Jenkins offers many useful variables, accessible to Windows batch scripts.

xcopy "C:\Users\gstaffor\Documents\NetBeansProjects\HelloGlassFish\HelloGlassFish" "%WORKSPACE%" /s /e /h /y

Next, add the second Build task, ‘Invoke Ant’. I assume you already have Ant configured for Jenkins. In the ‘Target’s text box, enter the Ant target we created in NetBeans build.xml file, entitled ‘jenkins-glassfish-deploy’ (see call-out 2 in the below screen-grab). If the name of your build file is anything other than the default ‘build.xml’, you will need to enter the Ant file name.

Lastly, add the single Post-build Action, ‘Publish JUnit test result report’. This will show us a visual representation of the results of our project’s unit-tests. Input the relative path to your reports from the workspace root. The path should be similar to call-out 3 in the screen-grab, below.

When complete, the HelloGlassFish Job’s configuration should resemble the screen-grab, below.

Jenkins HelloGlassFish Project Configuration

Save and close the configuration. Build the HelloGlassFish Job in Jenkins and make sure it succeeds with error.

GlassFish

Open GlassFish’s browser-based Domain Admin Console, usually on server port 4848, by default. On the left-hand side of the main window, under ‘Common Tasks’, tip the ‘Applications’ node. You should see the HelloGlassFish application is now deployed to GlassFish. You don’t have to do anything in GlassFish, Jenkins and Ant has taken care of everything.

GlassFish’s browser-based Domain Admin Console

To view the HelloGlassFish application, open a new browser window and direct it to ‘http://localhost:8080/HelloGlassFish/resources/helloWorld’. You should see a ‘Hello World!’ message displayed in your browser’s window. Note, since we only changed the name of the default HelloWorld NetBeans sample project to HelloGlassFish, not the web service’s URI, ‘helloWorld’ is still a required part of the URL path.

Redeploying the Project

Lastly, let’s demonstrate how easily changes to our project can be re-complied, re-tested, and re-deployed to GlassFish by Jenkins and Ant. Return to the HelloGlassFish project in NetBeans and open the NameStorageBean.java class. Change the value of the ‘name’ field from ‘World’ to ‘GlassFish’ and save the changes. Don’t build or do anything else in NetBeans. Instead, return to Jenkins and build the HelloGlassFish Job, again.

Change the NameStorageBean name Field

When the Job has finished building, re-direct your browser back to ‘http://localhost:8080/HelloGlassFish/resources/helloWorld’. You should now see a ‘Hello GlassFish!’ message displayed in your browser’s window instead of the earlier message, ‘Hello World!’. Jenkins has called the Ant target, which in turn re-compiled, re-tested, and re-deployed the modified HelloGlassFish application to GlassFish.

HelloGlassFish RESTful Web Service Demo

Helpful Links

Apache Ant: ant.apache.org
Apache Ant Tutorial: www.vogella.com/articles/ApacheAnt/article.html
GlassFish: glassfish.java.net
GlassFish asadmin deploy sub-command: docs.oracle.com/cd/E26576_01/doc.312/e24938/deploy.htm#deploy-1
Jenkins: jenkins-ci.org
NetBeans: netbeans.org
Windows command line xcopy command: commandwindows.com/xcopy.htm
Modifying PATH Environment Variable: www.java.com/en/download/help/path.xml

Ant, Apache Ant, Application, Automated Deployment, Automation, Build, Continuous Integration, Deploy, Deployment, GlassFish, Java, JAVA EE, Jenkins, JUnit, NetBeans, REST, RESTful Web Services, Target

5 Comments

Consuming Cross-Domain WCF REST Services with jQuery using JSONP

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in .NET Development, Software Development, SQL Server Development on September 25, 2011

Restaurant Menu / Order Form Preview

Introduction

In a previous article, Interactive Form Functionality on the Client-Side Using jQuery, I demonstrated the use of HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, and jQuery’s AJAX API to create a simple restaurant menu/order form. Although the previous article effectively demonstrated the use of these client-side technologies, the source of the restaurant’s menu items, a static XML file, was not intended to represent a true ‘production-class’ data source. Nowadays, to access data and business logic across the Enterprise or across the Internet, developers are more apt to build service-oriented applications that expose RESTful web services, and client applications that consume those services. RESTful services are services which conform to the REST (Representational State Transfer) architectural pattern. More information on REST can be obtained by reading Chapter 5 and 6 of REST’s author Roy Fielding’s Doctoral Dissertation. Most modern web technologies communicate with RESTful web services, including Microsoft’s Silverlight, Web Forms, and MVC, JavaFX, Adobe Flash, PHP, Python, and Ruby on Rails.

This article will expand on the restaurant menu/order form example from the previous article, replacing the static XML file with a WCF Service. The article will demonstrate the following:

Use of jQuery’s AJAX API to bi-bidirectionally communicate with WCF Services
Cross-domain communication with WCF Services using JSONP
Serialization of complex, nested .NET objects into JSONP-format HTTP Response Messages
Deserialization of JSONP-format HTTP Request Messages into complex, nested .NET objects
Optimization of JavaScript and the use of caching to maximize the speed of content delivery to the Client

Source code is now available on GitHub. As of May 2014, there is a revised version of the project on the ‘rev2014′ branch, on GitHub. The below post describes the original code on the ‘Master’ branch. All details are posted on GitHub.

Background

WCF

For .NET developers, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Microsoft’s platform for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), is the current preferred choice for building service-oriented applications. According to Microsoft, WCF is part of the .NET Framework that provides a unified programming model for rapidly building service-oriented applications that communicate across the web and the enterprise.

Prior to WCF, Microsoft offered ASP.NET XML Web Service, or ASP.NET Web Services for short. ASP.NET Web Services send and receive messages using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) via HTTP. Data is serialized from instances of .NET objects into XML-format SOAP messages (or, ‘XML in a SOAP envelop’ as they are also known), and vice-versus. Metadata about the ASP.NET Web Services is contained in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Although still prevalent, ASP.NET Web Services is now considered a legacy technology with the advent of WCF, according to Microsoft. SOAP, a protocol for accessing a Web Service, does not conform to REST architecture guidelines.

Hosted on Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Services) Web Server, WCF is a complex, yet robust and flexible service-oriented framework. By properly configuring WCF Services, developers can precisely expose business logic and data sources to clients in a variety of ways. WCF Services can send and receive messages as XML in a SOAP envelop, as well as RESTful formats, including POX (plain old XML), ATOM (an XML language used for web feeds), and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).

JSON/JSONP

The example in this article uses JSON, more specifically JSONP (JSON with Padding), a specialized type of JSON, to exchange information with WCF Services. JSON is an open and text-based data exchange format that provides a standardized data exchange format better suited for AJAX-style web applications. Compared to XML, JSON-formatted messages are smaller in size. For example, the restaurant menu used in this article, formatted as XML, is 927 bytes. The same message, formatted in JSONP is only 311 bytes, about one-third the size. The savings when transmitting JSON-format messages over slow connections, to mobile devices, or to potentially millions of simultaneous web-browsers, is significant.

Since the WCF Service will be hosted in a different domain (a different port in the example) than the web site with the restaurant menu and order form, we must use JSONP. JSONP, based on JSON, that allows pages to request data from a server in a different domain, normally disallowed, due to ‘same origin policy’. The same origin policy is an important security concept for browser-side programming languages, such as JavaScript. According to Wikipedia, same origin policy permits scripts running on pages originating from the same site to access each others methods and properties with no specific restrictions, but prevents access to most methods and properties across pages on different sites. JSONP takes advantage of the open policy for HTML <script> elements.

Below is an example of the article’s restaurant menu formatted in JSONP, and returned by the WCF Service as part of the HTTP Response to the client’s HTTP Request’s GET method.

    RestaurantMenu([
    {"Description":"Cheeseburger","Id":1,"Price":3.99},
    {"Description":"Chicken Sandwich","Id":4,"Price":4.99},
    {"Description":"Coffee","Id":7,"Price":0.99},{"Description":"French Fries",
    "Id":5,"Price":1.29},{"Description":"Hamburger","Id":2,"Price":2.99},
    {"Description":"Hot Dog","Id":3,"Price":2.49},
    {"Description":"Ice Cream Cone","Id":9,"Price":1.99},
    {"Description":"Soft Drink","Id":6,"Price":1.19},{"Description":"Water",
    "Id":8,"Price":0}]);

AJAX (well, not really…)

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) asynchronously exchanges data between the browser and web server, avoiding page reloads, using object. Despite the name, XMLHttpRequest, AJAX can work with JSON in addition to XML message formatting. Other formats include JSONP, JavaScript, HTML, and text. Using jQuery’s AJAX API, we will make HTTP Requests to the server using the GET method. Other HTTP methods include POST, PUT, and DELETE. To access cross-domain resources, in this case the WCF Service, the client makes a HTTP Request using the GET method.

Writing this article, I discovered that using JSONP technically isn’t AJAX because it does not use the XMLHttpRequest object, a primary requirement of AJAX. JSONP-format HTTP Requests are made by inserting the HTML <script> tag into the DOM, dynamically. The Content-Type of the HTTP Response from the WCF Service, as seen with Firebug, is application/x-javascript, not application/json, as with regular JSON. I’m just happy if it all works, AJAX or not.

Using the Code

The Visual Studio 2010 Solution used in this article contains (3) projects shown below. All code for this article is available for download at on The Code Project.

Restaurant – C# Class Library
RestaurantWcfService – C# WCF REST Service Application
RestaurantDemoSite – Existing Web Site

Restaurant Class Library

The C# Class Library Project, Restaurant, contains the primary business objects and business logic. Classes that will be instantiated to hold the restaurant menu and restaurant orders include RestaurantMenu, MenuItem, RestaurantOrder, and OrderItem. Both RestaurantMenu and RestaurantOrder inherit from System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection<T>. RestaurantMenu contains instances of MenuItem, while RestaurantOrder contains instances of OrderItem.

The business logic for deserializing the JSON-format HTTP Request containing the restaurant order is handled by the ProcessOrder class. I struggled with deserializing the JSONP-formatted HTTP Request into an instance of RestaurantOrder with the standard .NET System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer class. I solved the deserialization issue by using Json.NET. This .NET Framework, described as a flexible JSON serializer to convert .NET objects to JSON and back again, was created by James Newton-King. It was a real lifesaver. Json.NET is available on Codeplex. Before passing the RAW JSONP-format HTTP Request to Json.NET, I still had to clean it up using the NormalizeJsonString method I wrote.

Lastly, ProcessOrder includes the method WriteOrderToFile, which writes the restaurant order to a text file. This is intended to demonstrate how orders could be sent from the client to the server, stored, and then reloaded and deserialized later, as needed. In order to use this method successfully, you need to create the ‘c:\RestaurantOrders‘ folder path and add permissions for the IUSR user account to read and write to the RestaurantOrders folder.

The ProcessOrder class (note the reference to Json.NET: Newtonsoft.Json):

using Newtonsoft.Json;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;

namespace Restaurant
{
    public class ProcessOrder
    {
        public const string STR_JsonFilePath = @"c:\RestaurantOrders\";

        public string ProcessOrderJSON(string restaurantOrder)
        {
            if (restaurantOrder.Length &lt; 1)
            {
                return "Error: Empty message string...";
            }

            try
            {
                var orderId = Guid.NewGuid();
                NormalizeJsonString(ref restaurantOrder);

                //Json.NET: http://james.newtonking.com/projects/json-net.aspx
                var order =
                JsonConvert.DeserializeObject
                &lt;restaurantorder&gt;(restaurantOrder);
                WriteOrderToFile(restaurantOrder, orderId);

                return String.Format(
                "ORDER DETAILS{3}Time: {0}{3}Order Id: {1}{3}Items: {2}",
                DateTime.Now.ToLocalTime(), Guid.NewGuid(),
                order.Count(), Environment.NewLine);
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                return "Error: " + ex.Message;
            }
        }

        private void NormalizeJsonString(ref string restaurantOrder)
        {
            restaurantOrder = Uri.UnescapeDataString(restaurantOrder);
            int start = restaurantOrder.IndexOf("[");
            int end = restaurantOrder.IndexOf("]") + 1;
            int length = end - start;
            restaurantOrder = restaurantOrder.Substring(start, length);
        }

        private void WriteOrderToFile(string restaurantOrder, Guid OrderId)
        {
            //Make sure to add permissions for IUSR to folder path
            var fileName =
            String.Format("{0}{1}.txt", STR_JsonFilePath, OrderId);

            using (TextWriter writer = new StreamWriter(fileName))
            {
                writer.Write(restaurantOrder);
            }
        }
    }
}

Restaurant WCF Service

If you’ve built WCF Services before, you’ll be familiar with the file structure of this project. The RestaurantService.svc, the WCF Service file, contains no actual code, only a pointer to the code-behind RestaurantService.cs file. This file contains each method which will be exposed to the client through the WCF Service. The IRestaurantService.cs Interface file, defines the Service Contract between the RestaurantService class and the WCF Service. The IRestaurantService Interface also defines each Operational Contract with the class’s methods. The Operational Contract includes Operational Contract Attributes, which define how the Service Operation (a method with an Operational Contract) will operate as part of the WCF Service. Operational Contract Attributes in this example include the required invocation (HTTP method – GET), format of the HTTP Request and Response (JSON), and caching (for the restaurant menu). The WFC Service references (has a dependency on) the Restaurant Class Library.

The WCF Web Service Project, RestaurantWcfService, contains two methods that are exposed to the client. The first, GetCurrentMenu, serializes an instance of RestaurantMenu, containing nested instances of MenuItem. It returns the JSONP-format HTTP Response to the client. There are no parameters passed to the method by the HTTP Request.

The second method, SendOrder, accepts the JSONP-format order, through an input parameter of the string data type, from the client’s HTTP Request. SendOrder then passes the order to the ProcessOrderJSON method, part of the Restaurant.ProcessOrder class. ProcessOrderJSON returns a string to SendOrder, containing some order information (Order Id, date/time, and number of order items). This information is serialized and returned in the JSONP-format HTTP Response to the client. The Response verifies that the order was received and understood.

Lastly, the web.config file contains the WCF bindings, behaviors, endpoints, and caching configuration. I always find configuring this file properly to be a challenge due to the almost-infinite number of WCF configuration options. There are many references available on configuring WCF, but be careful, many were written prior to .NET Framework 4. Configuring WCF for REST and JSONP became much easier with .NET Framework 4. Make sure you refer to the latest materials from MSDN on WCF for .NET Framework 4.

The IRestaurantService.cs Interface:

using Restaurant;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Linq;
using System.ServiceModel;
using System.ServiceModel.Web;

namespace RestaurantWcfService
{
    [ServiceContract]
    public interface IRestaurantService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        [Description("Returns a copy of the restaurant menu.")]
        [WebGet(BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare,
        RequestFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,
        ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]
        [AspNetCacheProfile("CacheFor10Seconds")]
        RestaurantMenu GetCurrentMenu();

        [OperationContract]
        [Description("Accepts a menu order and return an order confirmation.")]
        [WebGet(BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare,
        RequestFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,
        ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,
        UriTemplate = "SendOrder?restaurantOrder={restaurantOrder}")]
        string SendOrder(string restaurantOrder);
    }
}

The RestaurantService.cs Class (inherits from IRestaurantService.cs):

using Restaurant;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using System.Linq;
using System.ServiceModel.Activation;

namespace RestaurantWcfService
{
    [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode =
    AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]
    public class RestaurantService : IRestaurantService
    {
        public RestaurantMenu GetCurrentMenu()
        {
            //Instantiates new RestaurantMenu object and
            //sorts MeuItem objects by byDescription using LINQ
            var menuToReturn = new RestaurantMenu();

            var menuToReturnOrdered = (
                from items in menuToReturn
                orderby items.Description
                select items).ToList();

            menuToReturn = new RestaurantMenu(menuToReturnOrdered);
            return menuToReturn;
        }

        public string SendOrder(string restaurantOrder)
        {
            //Instantiates new ProcessOrder object and
            //passes JSON-format order string to ProcessOrderJSON method
            var orderProcessor = new ProcessOrder();
            var orderResponse =
                orderProcessor.ProcessOrderJSON(restaurantOrder);

            return orderResponse;
        }
    }
}

The WCF Service’s web.config File:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <compilation debug="false" targetFramework="4.0" />
        <caching>
            <outputCacheSettings>
                <outputCacheProfiles>
                    <add name="CacheFor10Seconds" duration="10"
                         varyByParam="none" />
                </outputCacheProfiles>
            </outputCacheSettings>
        </caching>
    </system.web>
    <system.serviceModel>
        <bindings>
            <webHttpBinding>
                <binding name="webHttpBindingWithJsonP"
                         crossDomainScriptAccessEnabled="true" />
            </webHttpBinding>
        </bindings>
        <behaviors>
            <endpointBehaviors>
                <behavior name="webHttpBehavior">
                    <webHttp helpEnabled="true"/>
                </behavior>
            </endpointBehaviors>
            <serviceBehaviors>
                <behavior>
                    <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
                </behavior>
            </serviceBehaviors>
        </behaviors>
        <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true"
            multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" />
        <services>
            <service name="RestaurantWcfService.RestaurantService">
                <endpoint address="" behaviorConfiguration="webHttpBehavior"
                    binding="webHttpBinding"
                          bindingConfiguration="webHttpBindingWithJsonP"
                    contract="RestaurantWcfService.IRestaurantService" />
            </service>
        </services>
    </system.serviceModel>
    <system.webServer>
        <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"/>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

WCF Web HTTP Service Help

Once you have the article’s code installed and running, you can view more details about the WCF Service’s operations (methods) using the new .NET Framework 4 WCF Web HTTP Service Help Page feature. Depending on your IIS configuration, the local address should be similar to: http://localhost/MenuWcfRestService/RestaurantService.svc/Help.

.NET Framework 4 WCF Web HTTP Service Help Page

Restaurant Demo Site

RestaurantDemoSite is a non-ASP.NET website, just HTML and JavaScript. For this article, I chose to host the RestaurantDemoSiteweb site on a different port (2929) than the WCF Service on default port 80. I did this to demonstrate the necessity of JSONP for cross-domain scripting. Hosting them on two different ports is considered hosting on two different domains. Port 2929 is a randomly-selected open port on my particular development machine. Both the WCF Service and the website were setup as Virtual Directories in IIS, and then added to the Visual Studio 2010 Solution, along with the Restaurant Class Library.

Following the format of the first article, the website contains two identical pages, each with the same restaurant menu/order form. The ‘Development’ version is optimized for debugging and demonstration. The other, ‘Production’, with the JavaScript and CSS files minified and packed, is optimized for use in production. The demo uses the latest available jQuery JavaScript Library (jquery-1.6.3.js) and the jQuery plug-in, Format Currency (jquery.formatCurrency-1.4.0.js).

The page contains the new HTML5 <!DOCTYPE> declaration. I used HTML5’s new numeric input type for inputting the number of items to order. I defined a min and max value, also a new HTML5 feature. You can these HTML features working in the latest version of Google Chrome.

All of the client-side business logic is contained in the restaurant.js JavaScript file. This file makes calls to jQuery and Format Currency. I chose the sometimes controversial, static code analysis tool JSLint to help debug and refactor my JavaScript code. Even if you don’t agree with all of JSLint’s warnings, understanding the reason for them will really enhance your overall knowledge of JavaScript. A good alternative to JSLint, which I’ve also tried, is JSHint, a fork of the JSLint project. JSHint advertises itself as a more configurable version of JSLint.

The restaurant.js JavaScript file:

var addMenuItemToOrder, calculateSubtotal, clearForm, clickRemove,
formatRowColor, formatRowCurrency, getRestaurantMenu, handleOrder,
orderTotal, populateDropdown, tableToJson, sendOrder, wcfServiceUrl;

// Populate drop-down box with JSON data (menu)
populateDropdown = function () {
    var id, price, description;
    id = this.Id;
    price = this.Price;
    description = this.Description;
    $("#select_item")
        .append($("<option></option>")
        .val(id)
        .html(description)
        .attr("title", price));
};

// Use strict for all other functions
// Based on post at:
// http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-5-strict-mode-json-and-more/
(function () {
    "use strict";

    wcfServiceUrl =
        "http://localhost/MenuWcfRestService/RestaurantService.svc/";

    // Execute when the DOM is fully loaded
    $(document).ready(function () {
        getRestaurantMenu();
    });

    // Add selected item to order
    $(function () {
        $("#add_btn").click(addMenuItemToOrder);
    });

    // Place order if it contains items
    $(function () {
        $("#order_btn").click(handleOrder);
    });

    // Retrieve JSON data (menu) and loop for each menu item
    getRestaurantMenu = function () {
        $.ajax({
            cache: true,
            url: wcfServiceUrl + "GetCurrentMenu",
            data: "{}",
            type: "GET",
            jsonpCallback: "RestaurantMenu",
            contentType: "application/javascript",
            dataType: "jsonp",
            error: function () {
                alert("Menu failed!");
            },
            success: function (menu) {
                $.each(menu, populateDropdown); // must call function as var
            }
        });
    };

    // Add selected menu item to order table
    addMenuItemToOrder = function () {
        var order_item_selected_quantity, selected_item,
            order_item_selected_id, order_item_selected_description,
            order_item_selected_price, order_item_selected_subtotal;

        // Limit order quantity to between 1-99
        order_item_selected_quantity =
            parseInt($("#select_quantity").val(), 10);

        if (order_item_selected_quantity < 1 ||
        order_item_selected_quantity > 99 ||
        isNaN(order_item_selected_quantity)) {
            return;
        }

        // Can't add 'Select an Item...' to order
        if ($("#select_item").get(0).selectedIndex === 0) {
            return;
        }

        // Get values
        selected_item = $("#select_item option:selected");
        order_item_selected_id = parseInt(selected_item.val(), 10);
        order_item_selected_description = selected_item.text();
        order_item_selected_price = parseFloat(selected_item.attr("title"));

        // Calculate subtotal
        order_item_selected_subtotal =
            calculateSubtotal(order_item_selected_price,
            order_item_selected_quantity);

        // Write out menu selection to table row
        $("<tr class='order_row'></tr>").html("<td>" +
            order_item_selected_quantity +
            "</td><td class='order_item_id'>" +
            order_item_selected_id +
            "</td><td class='order_item_name'>" +
            order_item_selected_description +
            "</td><td class='order_item_price'>" +
            order_item_selected_price +
            "</td><td class='order_item_subtotal'>" +
            order_item_selected_subtotal +
            "</td><td><input type='button' value='remove' /></td>")
            .appendTo("#order_cart").hide();

        // Display grand total of order_item_selected_id
        $("#order_cart tr.order_row:last").fadeIn("medium", function () {
            // Callback once animation is complete
            orderTotal();
        });

        formatRowCurrency();
        formatRowColor();
        clickRemove();
        clearForm();
    };

    // Calculate subtotal
    calculateSubtotal = function (price, quantity) {
        return price * quantity;
    };

    // Create alternating colored rows in order table
    formatRowColor = function () {
        $("#order_cart tr.order_row:odd").css("background-color", "#FAF9F9");
        $("#order_cart tr.order_row:even").css("background-color", "#FFF");
    };

    // Format new order item values to currency
    formatRowCurrency = function () {
        $("#order_cart td.order_item_price:last").formatCurrency();
        $("#order_cart td.order_item_subtotal:last").formatCurrency();
    };

    // Bind a click event to the correct remove button
    clickRemove = function () {
        $("#order_cart tr.order_row:last input").click(function () {
            $(this).parent().parent().children().fadeOut("fast", function () {
                $(this).parent().slideUp("slow", function () { // the row (tr)
                    $(this).remove(); // the row (tr)
                    orderTotal();
                });
            });
        });
    };

    // Clear order input form and re-focus cursor
    clearForm = function () {
        $("#select_quantity").val("");
        $("#select_item option:first-child").attr("selected", "selected");
        $("#select_quantity").focus();
    };

    // Calculate new order total
    orderTotal = function () {
        var order_total = 0;

        $("#order_cart td.order_item_subtotal").each(function () {
            var amount = ($(this).html()).replace("$", "");
            order_total += parseFloat(amount);
        });

        $("#order_total").text(order_total).formatCurrency();
    };

    // Call functions to prepare order and send to WCF Service
    handleOrder = function () {
        if ($("#order_cart tr.order_row:last").length === 0) {
            alert("No items selected...");
        } else {
            var data = tableToJson();
            sendOrder(data);
        }
    };

    // Convert HTML table data into an array
    // Based on code from:
    // http://johndyer.name/post/table-tag-to-json-data.aspx
    tableToJson = function () {
        var data, headers, orderCartTable, myTableRow, rowData, i, j;

        headers = ["Quantity", "Id"];
        data = [];
        orderCartTable = document.getElementById("order_cart");

        // Go through cells
        for (i = 1; i < orderCartTable.rows.length - 1; i++) {
            myTableRow = orderCartTable.rows[i];
            rowData = {};

            for (j = 0; j < 2; j++) {
                rowData[headers[j]] = myTableRow.cells[j].innerHTML;
            }

            data.push(rowData);
        }

        return data;
    };

    // Convert array to JSON and send to WCF Service
    sendOrder = function (data) {
        var jsonString = JSON.stringify({ restaurantOrder: data });

        $.ajax({
            url: wcfServiceUrl + "SendOrder?restaurantOrder=" + jsonString,
            type: "GET",
            contentType: "application/javascript",
            dataType: "jsonp",
            jsonpCallback: "OrderResponse",
            error: function () {
                alert("Order failed!");
            },
            success: function (confirmation) {
                alert(confirmation.toString());
            }
        });
    };
} ());

Using Firebug to Look Behind the Scenes

In real life, a restaurant’s menu changes pretty infrequently. Therefore, to speed page delivery, I chose to cache the restaurant’s menu on the client-side. Caching is configured as part of the Operational Contract in IRestaurantService, as well as in the jQuery AJAX call to GetCurrentMenu in restaurant.js. In this example, I set the cache to 10 seconds, which can be confirmed by looking at the Cache-Control property in the HTTP Response Header of the call to GetCurrentMenu, using Firebug.

Below is a screen grab of initial load of the restaurant menu/order form page in Firefox with Firebug running. Note the ‘Domain’ of the AJAX call is different than the page and associated files. Also, both the ‘Status’ and ‘Remote IP’ indicate the HTTP Response to GetCurrentMenu (the restaurant’s menu) is cached, along with the page and associated files. Firebug is an invaluable tool in the development and debugging of JavaScript, especially when working with AJAX.

Firebug in Firefox – Caching

Points of Interest

Several things stood out to me as a result of writing this article:

WCF – No matter how many times I work with WCF Services, getting them configured properly seems like 90% technical knowledge and 10% luck. Ok, maybe 20% luck! Seriously, there are a lot of great resources on the web regarding WCF configuration issues. If you have a specific problem with WCF, odds are someone else already had it and has published a solution. Make sure the information is current to the .NET Framework you are working with.
Third-party Libraries, Plug-ins, and Frameworks – Don’t confine yourself to using the out-of-the-box .NET Framework, JavaScript, or jQuery to solve all your coding challenges. There are an endless variety of Frameworks, JavaScript Libraries, and jQuery Plug-ins, available. Being a good developer is about providing the best solution to a problem, not necessarily writing each and every line of code, yourself. A few minutes of research can be worth hours of coding!
Refactoring – Refactoring your code is critical. Just making it work is not good enough. Added bonus? I’ve personally gained a considerable amount of knowledge about software development through refactoring. Forcing yourself to go back and optimize code can be a tremendous learning opportunity. Using third-party refactoring tools such JSLint/JSHint, FxCop, RefactorPro!, CodeRush, ReSharper, and others is a great way to improve both your refactoring and coding skills. I use all these tools as much as possible.
Cross-Domain with JSONP – Using JSONP is one technique to get around the limitations imposed by the same origin policy. JSONP has its pros and cons. Spend some time to research other methods that might better benefit your project requirements.

.NET, AJAX, C#, HTML, IIS, Internet Information Server, JavaScript, jQuery, JSON, JSON with Padding, JSONP, JSONwithPadding, REST, RESTful Web Services, same origin policy, Visual Studio, VS2010, WCF, Windows

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