Add my custom http header to Spring RestTemplate request / extend RestTemplate

Question

My current code:

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
restTemplate.getMessageConverters().add(new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter());
Mall[] malls = restTemplate.getForObject(url, Mall[].class);

I need to add some custom headers for my request, in form:

X-TP-DeviceID : <GUID>

What is the simplest way to do that in my case? Is there any way to add custom headers definition to my restTemplate object before I send the request to server?

[edit]

Is it correct?

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
restTemplate.getMessageConverters().add(new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter());

HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
headers.set("X-TP-DeviceID", "1234567890");
HttpEntity entity = new HttpEntity(headers);

HttpEntity<Mall[]> response = restTemplate.exchange(url, HttpMethod.GET, entity, Mall[].class);

Mall[] malls = response.getBody();

[added]

So, I managed to get it working. However, I'm not fully satisfied with that. In my case I will need to provide the same custom headers for all the calls I make.

So, my next question is - Is it possible to set my custom headers to be added automatically on each web-service call, for example, by extending RestTemplate class and putting all custom headers there? Then, all I would be needing to do would be to simply use my custom extended RestTemplate instead of the stock one, and all my custom headers will be present there by default.

Answer 1

You can pass custom http headers with RestTemplate exchange method as below.

HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
headers.setAccept(Arrays.asList(new MediaType[] { MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON }));
headers.setContentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);
headers.set("X-TP-DeviceID", "your value");

HttpEntity<RestRequest> entityReq = new HttpEntity<RestRequest>(request, headers);

RestTemplate template = new RestTemplate();

ResponseEntity<RestResponse> respEntity = template
    .exchange("RestSvcUrl", HttpMethod.POST, entityReq, RestResponse.class);

EDIT : Below is the updated code. This link has several ways of calling rest service with examples

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();

HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
headers.setAccept(Arrays.asList(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON));
headers.setContentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);
headers.set("X-TP-DeviceID", "your value");

HttpEntity<String> entity = new HttpEntity<String>("parameters", headers);

ResponseEntity<Mall[]> respEntity = restTemplate.exchange(url, HttpMethod.POST, entity, Mall[].class);

Mall[] resp = respEntity.getBody();

Answer 2

If the goal is to have a reusable RestTemplate which is in general useful for attaching the same header to a series of similar request a org.springframework.boot.web.client.RestTemplateCustomizer parameter can be used with a RestTemplateBuilder:

 String accessToken= "<the oauth 2 token>";
 RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplateBuilder(rt-> rt.getInterceptors().add((request, body, execution) -> {
        request.getHeaders().add("Authorization", "Bearer "+accessToken);
        return execution.execute(request, body);
    })).build();

Answer 3

Add a "User-Agent" header to your request.

Some servers attempt to block spidering programs and scrapers from accessing their server because, in earlier days, requests did not send a user agent header.

You can either try to set a custom user agent value or use some value that identifies a Browser like "Mozilla/5.0 Firefox/26.0"

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();

headers.setAccept(Arrays.asList(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON));
headers.setContentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);
headers.add("user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 Firefox/26.0");
headers.set("user-key", "your-password-123"); // optional - in case you auth in headers
HttpEntity<String> entity = new HttpEntity<String>("parameters", headers);
ResponseEntity<Game[]> respEntity = restTemplate.exchange(url, HttpMethod.GET, entity, Game[].class);

logger.info(respEntity.toString());

Answer 4

Here's a method I wrote to check if an URL exists or not. I had a requirement to add a request header. It's Groovy but should be fairly simple to adapt to Java. Essentially I'm using the org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate#execute(java.lang.String, org.springframework.http.HttpMethod, org.springframework.web.client.RequestCallback, org.springframework.web.client.ResponseExtractor<T>, java.lang.Object...) API method. I guess the solution you arrive at depends at least in part on the HTTP method you want to execute. The key take away from example below is that I'm passing a Groovy closure (The third parameter to method restTemplate.execute(), which is more or less, loosely speaking a Lambda in Java world) that is executed by the Spring API as a callback to be able to manipulate the request object before Spring executes the command,

boolean isUrlExists(String url) {
    try {
      return (restTemplate.execute(url, HttpMethod.HEAD,
              { ClientHttpRequest request -> request.headers.add('header-name', 'header-value') },
              { ClientHttpResponse response -> response.headers }) as HttpHeaders)?.get('some-response-header-name')?.contains('some-response-header-value')
    } catch (Exception e) {
      log.warn("Problem checking if $url exists", e)
    }
    false
  }