how to send an array in url request

Question

My requirement is as follows:

I want to give actor name, start date, end date and get all the films he acted in that period.

For that reason, my service request is like this.

  http://localhost:8080/MovieDB/GetJson?name=Actor&startDate=20120101&endDate=20120505

Now, i want to improve it. I want to give a start date, end date and more than one actor name and want to see all those actors movies in that period.

I am not sure how should my url look to support such thing.

I am writing a java based web service using spring.

Below code is to support one actor

   @RequestMapping(value = "/GetJson", method = RequestMethod.GET) 
    public void getJson(@RequestParam("name") String ticker, @RequestParam("startDate") String startDate, @RequestParam("endDate") String endDate) {
   //code to get results from db for those params.
 }

One solution i am thinking is using a % symbol to seperate actor names. For example:

 http://localhost:8080/MovieDB/GetJson?name=Actor1%Actor2%Actor3&startDate=20120101&endDate=20120505

Now, in the controller i will parse the name string with % and get back all actors names.

Is this a good way to do this or is there a standard approach?

Thanks

Solution

Separate with commas:

http://localhost:8080/MovieDB/GetJson?name=Actor1,Actor2,Actor3&startDate=20120101&endDate=20120505

or:

http://localhost:8080/MovieDB/GetJson?name=Actor1&name=Actor2&name=Actor3&startDate=20120101&endDate=20120505

or:

http://localhost:8080/MovieDB/GetJson?name[0]=Actor1&name[1]=Actor2&name[2]=Actor3&startDate=20120101&endDate=20120505

Either way, your method signature needs to be:

@RequestMapping(value = "/GetJson", method = RequestMethod.GET) 
public void getJson(@RequestParam("name") String[] ticker, @RequestParam("startDate") String startDate, @RequestParam("endDate") String endDate) {
   //code to get results from db for those params.
 }

Comments

[Kishan Bheemajiyani]

but in case if u having 1000 size of array then u can not write this all the thing separate na.. ??

[TPPZ]

Is there a "Spring documentation" link you could point to regarding those 3 different ways of writing the URLs?

[Gelin Luo]

approach one (separate with commas) is different from the other two. Tried on a Java app (server side backed by undertow), if you pass name=Actor1,Actor2,Actor3, the server will not get an array for your name parameter, instead you get one single string: Actor1,Actor2,Actor3 param. The other two is different, they all give name parameter with an array of values: ["Actor1", "Actor2", "Actor3"]. According to stackoverflow.com/questions/6243051/…, many other frameworks also treat approach one as a single string query param instead of array

[Qussay Najjar]

with comma separated values you can receive them as a List<String> request param