Maven resource filtering not working on spring configuration xml file

I recently run on a weird problem while running property filtering on tutorial project that I'm writing.

One of my configuration files (spring XML config files) was being partially filtered (only the first 2 variables were properly "filtered" while the rest was left as they were )

Below is my configuration file. Only the first 2 variables where filtered (mongo.host & mongo.port) :

I've tried a few things and realized that if I moved them around then suddenly it would work but I couldn't put my finger on what was causing the problem

So I decided to remove line by line from the bottom up and check if something will fix the problem

As it turns out what was causing the problem was the '@' in my comment right before the repository configuration.

This actually was a maven bug in the maven-resources-plugin but fear not the bug was corrected in the 2.6 version

So if you come up by this behavior check your pom.xml configuration as by default my maven was using the 2.4.1 version and change it in the build section of your POM to use the more recent version

...

...
    
            
                org.apache.maven.plugins
                maven-resources-plugin
                2.6
            
   
...



...

Spring MVC and Swagger. Generating documentation for your RESTful web services - PART 2

Automating your RESTful web services documentation Using Spring MVC with Swagger for generating it

Part 2 - Implementing some business logic and configuring Swagger

1.- Configuring swagger and swagger-ui

1.1.- What is swagger ?

Swagger is a specification and complete framework implementation for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services as stated by their official website

Personally I find Swagger to be a pretty nice way to generate my web services documentation instead of having to rewrite everything again (I already comment my code so it should be enough!)

However at the moment swagger does not support Spring MVC natively but there is an implementation over at github here

As stated by the developer not all the Swagger annotations are currently supported but the implementation works mainly with the Spring MVC annotations(@Controller, @RequestMapping , etc.) which I just what I needed.

1.2.- Integrating swagger into spring

First thing to do is to create a configuration file needed by the swagger-spring-mvc implementation. So go ahead and create a swagger.properties files under src/main/resources/config

#this is the base url for your applications (basically the root url for all your webservices)
documentation.services.basePath=http://localhost:9090/spring-mvc-swagger-tutorial
documentation.services.version=1.0

head up to your spring-web.xml configuration file and add the following lines :

1.3.- Swagger UI

In order to display the web services documentation swaggers it's necessary to download and add the swagger-ui libraries to your project

To my knowledge the Swagger UI dependency cannot be found in the maven repository, so you need to downloaded manually from here :
swagger-ui download

Once you've downloaded it unzip it in your maven webbap folder. you should end up with a tree similar to this one :

Note : It's equally possible to clone the GIT repository instead of downloading the files if you prefer

You will now need to edit the index.html file and change the discoveryUrl parameter to reflect your application

From :

   "discoveryUrl": "http://petstore.swagger.wordnik.com/api/api-docs.json",  

To your application base url (eg : http://localhost:9090/spring-mvc-swagger-tutorial/api-docs.json) :

   "discoveryUrl":"http://localhost:9090/spring-mvc-swagger-tutorial/api-docs.json", 

2.- Writing the business logic

The future controller will be using a simple DAO implementation to recover data from the database

Below is the DAO interface that will be used by the controller. To save some space I will not be posting the DAO implementation here but you can get it from GitHub here

package com.ufasoli.tutorial.swagger.springmvc.core.dao;

import com.ufasoli.tutorial.swagger.springmvc.core.status.OperationResult;
import java.util.List;

public interface DAO<T, U> {

    public OperationResult create(T object);  
    public OperationResult<T> update(U id, T object);  
    public OperationResult delete(U id);  
    public T findOne(U id);  
    public List<T> findAll();
}

I realize the interface and the implementation are far from perfect there is no proper exception handling but since that is not the main goal of this tutorial please bear with me :)

3.- Writing the Spring controllers and swagger "magic"

Finally we are almost there one last thing before we can begin writing some spring controllers and adding some swagger "magic"

There are a few swagger annotations allowing you to customize what it will be printed out by the swagger-ui interface. We'll be using the following :

• @ApiOperation : describes an API operation or method
• @ApiParam : describes an api method parameter and it's eventual constraints (ie : required)
• @ApiError : describes a possible error (HTTP Status) and the error's cause

Bellow is a sample spring controller annotated with the appropriate swagger annotations

package com.ufasoli.tutorial.swagger.springmvc.web.services;
import com.ufasoli.tutorial.swagger.springmvc.core.dao.DAO;
import com.ufasoli.tutorial.swagger.springmvc.core.model.Book;
import com.ufasoli.tutorial.swagger.springmvc.core.status.OperationResult;
import com.wordnik.swagger.annotations.ApiOperation;
import com.wordnik.swagger.annotations.ApiParam;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.*;
import java.util.List;


@Controller
@RequestMapping(value = "/books", produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
public class BookService {

    @Autowired
    private DAO<Book, String> bookDAO;


    @ApiOperation(value = "Creates a Book")
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST)
    public  @ResponseBody void create(@ApiParam(required = true, name = "book", value = "The book object that needs to be created")@RequestBody Book book){

        return bookDAO.create(book);
    }

    
    @ApiOperation(value = "Method to update a book")
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.PUT, value = "/{bookId}")
    public  @ResponseBody OperationResult<Book> update(
            @ApiParam(required = true, value = "The id of the book that should be updated", name = "bookId")@PathVariable("bookId") String bookId,
                    @ApiParam(required = true, name = "book", value = "The book object that needs to be updated")@RequestBody Book book){

        return bookDAO.update(bookId, book);
    }

    
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET)
    @ApiOperation(value = "Lists all the books in the database")
    public  @ResponseBody List<Book> list(){
        return bookDAO.findAll();
    }

    
    @ApiOperation(value = "Retrieves a book based on their id")
    @ApiErrors(value = {@ApiError(code=404, reason = "No book corresponding to the id was found")})
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/{bookId}")
    public  @ResponseBody Book view(@ApiParam(name = "bookId" , required = true, value = "The id of the book that needs to be retrieved")@PathVariable("bookId") String bookId){
         
      Book book =  bookDAO.findOne(bookId);

        if(book == null){

            response.setStatus(404);
        }
        return book;
    }

    
    @ApiOperation(value = "Deletes a book based on their id")
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.DELETE, value = "/{bookId}")
    public  @ResponseBody OperationResult delete(@ApiParam(name = "bookId", value = "The id of the book to be deleted", required = true)@PathVariable("bookId") String bookId){
      return bookDAO.delete(bookId);

    }

}

4.- Time to check-out the generated documentation

Once again fire up your Jetty server by running the maven goal

  mvn jetty:run

Once your server is started head up to the following URL using your inseparable favorite browser :

http://localhost:9090/spring-mvc-swagger-tutorial/

If Murphy's law has not applied here we should see swagger-ui's homepage

Go ahead and click on the show/hide link right next to the books element. You should see a pretty nice ui show you the different api operations available along with the required params and HTTP methods :

What's even better swagger-ui offers you a light REST client allowing you to directly test your API operations by simply selecting an operation and filling the required parameters.

You can play with the different annotations and options and observe the different results that they produce

5.- Wrapping things up

So that's it, I hope this tutorial was useful to you, even though you will no longer have any excuse to not having nice up-to-date documentation for your RESTful applications.

You can find this sample application over at github :

Swagger - Spring MVC tutorial sample application code

Spring MVC and Swagger. Generating documentation for your RESTful web services - PART 1

Automating your RESTful web services documentation Using Spring MVC with Swagger for generating it

Part 1 - Setting up the WAR and spring configuration

1.- Introduction

Through this simple tutorial I will be developing a simple web application using the following technologies :

• spring (mvc, core, jdbc) : Dependency Injection, Database access, RESTful web services implementation
• hsqldb : On memory database
• swagger : Documentation framework
• swagger-spring-mvc : Swagger integration with spring mvc
• maven : build lifecycle
• jetty : web application server

The main goal of this tutorial is to illustrate how the swagger documentation framework can be integrated into a spring mvc application.

2.- The Database Model

In this tutorial we will be using a very simple model consisting of 1 table :

3.- Creating the maven project structure

There are a few of Spring archetypes when creating java web applications but I find them oversized for this simple tutorial so I will use here the org.codehaus.mojo.archetypes.webapp-javaee6 archetype :

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.codehaus.mojo.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=webapp-javaee6 -DpackageName=com.ufasoli.tutorial.swagger.springmvc -DgroupId=com.ufasoli.tutorial -DartifactId=swagger-spring-mvc -Dversion=1.0

This should generate a pretty standard maven WAR project structure

Note : You should adapt your groupId and artifactId according to your config.

4.- Dependencies

In your pom.xml file add the following dependencies that we are going to need for our project :

...
 
        ${project.build.directory}
        UTF-8
        3.2.1.RELEASE
        1.8.0.10
    

    
        
            javax
            javaee-web-api
            6.0
            provided
        

        
            com.mangofactory
            swagger-springmvc
            0.5.2
        

        
            org.springframework
            spring-core
            ${version.spring}
        

        
            org.springframework
            spring-jdbc
            ${version.spring}
        
        
            org.springframework
            spring-expression
            ${version.spring}
        
        
            org.springframework
            spring-web
            ${version.spring}
        
        
            org.springframework
            spring-webmvc
            ${version.spring}
        

        
            org.springframework
            spring-beans
            ${version.spring}
        
        
            org.hsqldb
            hsqldb
            ${version.hsqldb}
        

    

...

5.- Spring Configuration

There are many schools when it comes to creating spring context files
I usually create a spring-web.xml file under the src/main/webapp/WEB-INF folder that I will use as my web application context and an applicationContext.xml file under src/main/resources/META-INF/spring that will be my application context.

5.1.- Configuring the Application Context (applicationContext.xml)

5.1.1- Setting up the classpath scanner

5.1.2- Setting up the database

Spring has a pretty nifty way to step up an in-memory database.You can provide a list of SQL scripts that will be executed when the database is started

I have written 2 SQL scripts one for creating the database and another one to have some sample data inserted in the database

This scripts can be found under src/main/resources/sql :

CREATE TABLE BOOKS (id VARCHAR NOT NULL, title VARCHAR NOT NULL, author VARCHAR NOT NULL, publicationYear INTEGER, comment VARCHAR, PRIMARY KEY(id))

INSERT INTO BOOKS VALUES ('1', 'A Game of Thrones', 'George R. R. Martin', 1996, 'n.c.');
INSERT INTO BOOKS VALUES ('2', 'A Clash of Kings', 'George R. R. Martin', 1998, 'n.c.');
INSERT INTO BOOKS VALUES ('3', 'A Storm of Swords', 'George R. R. Martin', 2000, 'n.c.');
INSERT INTO BOOKS VALUES ('4', 'A Feast for Crows ', 'George R. R. Martin', 2005, 'n.c.');
INSERT INTO BOOKS VALUES ('5', 'A Dance with Dragons', 'George R. R. Martin', 2011, 'It was about time!');
INSERT INTO BOOKS VALUES ('6', 'The Winds of Winter', 'George R. R. Martin', 2014, 'If we are lucky!');
INSERT INTO BOOKS VALUES ('7', 'A Dream of Spring', 'George R. R. Martin', 2100, 'oh c`mon');

We will now configure the applicationContext.xml file using a HSQL in-memory database and instruct spring to execute the SQL scripts in a predefined order as well as bootstrap Spring's JDBC template class which is an utility class that simplifies the use of JDBC

Below is how the applicationContext.xml file should look like :

With this configuration every time the application is started the database will be bootstraped and some sample data will be inserted

5.2.- Configuring the Web Application Context (spring-web.xml)

The Web Application context extended Application Context which is designed for work with the standard javax.servlet.ServletContext so it's able to communicate with the container.

5.2.1- Setting up the classpath scanner & the Spring MVC configuration

I will not go into the details of Spring but to sumarize the classpath scanner for the web application context will essentially pick up the controllers and register them in the context whereas the Spring MVC configuration will define how controllers should by discovered and how URLs should be handled

5.3.- Configuring the web.xml descriptor

It's now time to tell our web app to use spring-mvc. For this to happen we need to edit the web.xml file under src/main/webapp/WEB-INF and add the spring configuration :

     

    Spring MVC Swagger integration

      
        
            index.html
        

    
    
        contextConfigLocation
        classpath:/META-INF/spring/applicationContext.xml
    

    
    
        org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
    

    
    
        spring-servlet
        org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
        
        
            contextConfigLocation
            /WEB-INF/spring-web.xml
        
        1
    

    
    
        spring-servlet
        /
    

6.- Taking it for a spin

If everything goes according to plan we should be able to take our application for a spin with a simple hello world!

6.1.- Creating the HelloWorld Controller

Create a HelloWorldService.java file under src/main/java/ and the package of your choice

package com.ufasoli.tutorial.swagger.springmvc.web.services;

import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

@Controller
@RequestMapping(value = "/hello", produces = MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN_VALUE)
public class HelloWorldService {

    @RequestMapping( produces = MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN_VALUE, method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public @ResponseBody String sayHelloWorld(HttpServletResponse response){

        return "Hello World!";
    }
}

With this configuration spring will register your hello-world controller under :

  ${context.root}/hello

6.2.- Configuring jetty and running the app

We are almost there, the last thing we need to do is to configure our embedded Jetty server

Head to your pom.xml file

...


  
    ...
     
      org.mortbay.jetty
      maven-jetty-plugin
      6.1.26
      
        
          /spring-mvc-swagger-tutorial
        
        0
        
          
             9090
             60000
           
          
       
     
     ...


...

This configuration will start a jetty server under the port 9090 and deploy my application under the /spring-mvc-swagger-tutorial context-root

6.3.- Running the app

Head to your command line or favorite IDE and run the following maven goal

   mvn jetty:run

Wait for your server to start, you should see a message similar to:

...
  2013-06-06 15:23:50.668:INFO::jetty-6.1.26
2013-06-06 15:23:50.825:INFO::No Transaction manager found - if your webapp requires one, please configure one.
2013-06-06 15:23:51.135:INFO:/spring-mvc-swagger-tutorial:Initializing Spring root WebApplicationContext
log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader).
log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.
log4j:WARN See http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/faq.html#noconfig for more info.
2013-06-06 15:23:51.957:INFO:/spring-mvc-swagger-tutorial:Initializing Spring FrameworkServlet 'spring-servlet'
2013-06-06 15:23:53.511:INFO::Started SelectChannelConnector@0.0.0.0:9090
[INFO] Started Jetty Server

Now crack open your favorite browser and head to :

http://localhost:9090/spring-mvc-swagger-tutorial/hello

And if the programming Gods are good you should get your well deserved greeting

6.- Wrapping-up part 1

So that's it for part 1 of the tutorial. On the second part we will create a more complex controller and see how to integrate the Swagger framework into our project

You can find this sample application over at github :

Swagger - Spring MVC tutorial sample application code