RESTXQ
This page is part of the Developer Section. It describes how to use the RESTXQ API of BaseX.
RESTXQ, introduced by Adam Retter, is a new API that facilitates the use of XQuery as a Server Side processing language for the Web. RESTXQ has been inspired by Java’s JAX-RS API: it defines a pre-defined set of XQuery 3.0 annotations for mapping HTTP requests to XQuery functions, which in turn generate and return HTTP responses.
As of Version 7.2, RESTXQ is supported by BaseX. Note that various details of the specification may be subject to change due to the early state of the API.
Contents
Getting started
First of all, launch the BaseX as Web Application. By default, Jetty is used as web server. All HTTP services will be available on port 8984
, and the RESTXQ service is accessible at http://localhost:8984/restxq/
. If the server is started as servlet, all Main Options (such as the path to the database) can be configured in the web.xml
file. If run as a standalone application, the settings are stored in the file .basex
.
Module Declarations
A RESTXQ module needs to contain a declaration to the namespace http://exquery.org/ns/restxq
. A Resource Function is an XQuery function that has been marked up with RESTXQ annotations (annotations will be introduced with the upcoming XQuery 3.0 standard). When an HTTP request comes in, a resource function will be invoked that matches the constraints indicated by its annotations.
All files with extension *.xqm
, placed inside the directory specified by HTTPPATH
(refer to HTTP Server Configuration) will be treated as RESTXQ modules. These will be parsed for RESTXQ annotations and cached. If a module is modified, it will be parsed again at runtime.
A simple RESTXQ module is shown below, it is part of a clean installation and available at http://localhost:8984/restxq/ .
(:~ simplified module as in http/restxq.xqm :) module namespace page = 'http://basex.org/modules/web-page'; declare namespace rest = 'http://exquery.org/ns/restxq'; declare %rest:path("hello/{$world}") %rest:GET %rest:header-param("User-Agent", "{$agent}") function page:hello($world as xs:string, $agent as xs:string*) { <response> <title>Hello { $world }!</title> <info>You requested this page with { $agent }.</info> </response> };
If the URI http://localhost:8984/restxq/hello/world is accessed, the result will be kind of
<response> <title>Hello world!</title> <info>You requested this page with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13.</info> </response>
We added another method within that module:
declare %rest:path("form/") %rest:POST %rest:form-param("content","{$message}", "'no message delivered'") function page:hello-postman($message as xs:string) { <response> <title>Hello!</title> <info>It seems you posted a message: { $message }</info> </response> };
If you posted something (e.g. using curl or the embedded form at http://localhost:8984/restxq/ )
curl -i -X POST --data "content='Here comes the post'" http://admin:admin@localhost:8984/restxq/form
You would recieve
<response> <title>Hello!</title> <info>It seems you posted a message: 'Here comes the post'</info> </response>
Annotations
This section lists all annotations provided by RESTXQ. rest
is used as namespace prefix.
Constraints
Constraints restrict the HTTP requests that a resource function may process.
Paths
A resource function must have a single Path Annotation. It will be called if a URL matches the path segments and templates specified as argument. Path templates contain variables in curly brackets, and map the values of the actual request path to the function arguments.
The following example contains a path annotation with three segments and two templates. One of the function arguments is further specified with a data type, which means that the value for $variable
will be cast to an xs:integer
before being bound:
declare %rest:path("/a/path/{$with}/some/{$variable}") function($with, $variable as xs:integer) { ... };
HTTP Methods
The HTTP method annotations are equivalent to all HTTP request methods except for TRACE and CONNECT. Zero or more methods may be used on a function; if none is specified, the function will be invoked for each method.
The following function will be called if GET or POST is used as request method:
declare %rest:GET %rest:POST %rest:path("") function local:root() { <html/> };
The POST and PUT annotations may optionally take a string literal, which will be mapped to a named function parameter. Once again, the target variable must be embraced by curly brackets:
declare %rest:PUT("{$data}") %rest:path("") function local:put($data) { "Data: " || $data };
Content Types
- HTTP Content Types: One or more media-types may be specified as strings, e.g.:
%rest:consumes("application/xml", "text/xml")
- HTTP Accept: One or more media-types may be specified as strings, e.g.:
%rest:produces("application/atom+xml")
These default to */*
if no media-type annotations are given.
Parameters
Parameters are optional annotations that can be used to bind additional values to function arguments:
Query Strings
The value of the first parameter, if found in the Query String, will be assigned to the variable specified as second parameter. Optionally, a third parameter may be specified as default:
%rest:query-param("parameter", "{$value}", "default") %rest:query-param("answer", "{$answer}", 42, 43, 44) %rest:query-param("search", "{$search-param}")
HTML Form Fields
Form parameters are specified the same way as query strings. Their values are extracted from GET or POST requests.
%rest:form-param("parameter", "{$value}", "default")
HTTP Headers
Header parameters are specified the same way as query strings:
%rest:header-param("User-Agent","{$user-agent}") %rest:header-param("Referer","{$referer}", "none")
Cookies
Cookie parameters are specified the same way as query strings:
%rest:cookie-param("username","{$user}") %rest:cookie-param("authentication","{$auth}", "no_auth")
References
RESTXQ has been proposed by Adam Retter. More information on all specifics can be found in the following two documents:
- RESTful XQuery, Standardised XQuery 3.0 Annotations for REST. Paper, XMLPrague, 2012
- RESTXQ. Slides, MarkLogic User Group London, 2012