1. Overview
In this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how to use @RequestLine annotation in Feign client. @RequestLine is a template for defining the URI and query parameter for connecting with a RESTful web service.
2. Maven Dependency
To begin, let’s create a Spring Boot web project and include the spring-cloud-starter-openfeign or feign-core dependency to our pom.xml file. The spring-cloud-starter-openfeign includes feign-core dependency within it:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-openfeign</artifactId>
<version>3.1.2</version>
</dependency>
Or
<dependency>
<groupId>io.github.openfeign</groupId>
<artifactId>feign-core</artifactId>
<version>11.8</version>
</dependency>
3. @RequestLine in Feign Client
The @RequestLine Feign annotation specifies the HTTP verb, path, and request parameters as arguments in the Feign client. The path and request parameters are specified using the @Param annotation.
Normally in a Spring Boot application, we’d use @FeignClient, but we can also use @RequestLine if we don’t want to use the spring-cloud-starter-openfeign dependency. Using that dependency will give us an IllegalStateException if we use @RequestLine with @FeignClient.
The @FeignClient annotation’s String value is an arbitrary name that is used to create a Spring Cloud LoadBalancer client. We may additionally specify a URL and other parameters based on the requirements.
Let’s create an interface for using @RequestLine:
public interface EmployeeClient {
@RequestLine("GET /empployee/{id}?active={isActive}")
@Headers("Content-Type: application/json")
Employee getEmployee(@Param long id, @Param boolean isActive);
}
We should also provide @Headers where we define headers required by the rest API.
Now, we’ll call the interface thus created to call the actual API:
EmployeeClient employeeResource = Feign.builder().encoder(new SpringFormEncoder())
.target(EmployeeClient.class, "http://localhost:8081");
Employee employee = employeeResource.getEmployee(id, true);
4. Conclusion
In this article, we’ve demonstrated how and when @RequestLine annotation is used in Feign Client.
As is the custom, all code samples used in this tutorial are available on GitHub.
