Jersey(1.19.1) - Building Responses

Sometimes it is necessary to return additional information in response to a HTTP request. Such information may be built and returned using Response and Response.ResponseBuilder. For example, a common RESTful pattern for the creation of a new resource is to support a POST request that returns a 201 (Created) status code and a Location header whose value is the URI to the newly created resource. This may be achieved as follows:

@POST
@Consumes("application/xml")
public Response post(String content) {
    URI createdUri = ...
    create(content);
    return Response.created(createdUri).build();
}

In the above no representation produced is returned, this can be achieved by building an entity as part of the response as follows:

@POST
@Consumes("application/xml")
public Response post(String content) {
    URI createdUri = ...
    String createdContent = create(content);
    return Response.created(createdUri).entity(createdContent).build();
}

Response building provides other functionality such as setting the entity tag and last modified date of the representation.