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5. Working with XML

§Handling and serving XML requests

§Handling an XML request

An XML request is an HTTP request using a valid XML payload as the request body. It must specify the application/xml or text/xml MIME type in its Content-Type header.

By default an Action uses a any content body parser, which lets you retrieve the body as XML (actually as a NodeSeq):

def sayHello = Action { request =>
  request.body.asXml.map { xml =>
    (xml \\ "name" headOption).map(_.text).map { name =>
      Ok("Hello " + name)
    }.getOrElse {
      BadRequest("Missing parameter [name]")
    }
  }.getOrElse {
    BadRequest("Expecting Xml data")
  }
}

It’s way better (and simpler) to specify our own BodyParser to ask Play to parse the content body directly as XML:

def sayHello = Action(parse.xml) { request =>
  (request.body \\ "name" headOption).map(_.text).map { name =>
    Ok("Hello " + name)
  }.getOrElse {
    BadRequest("Missing parameter [name]")
  }
}

Note: When using an XML body parser, the request.body value is directly a valid NodeSeq.

You can test it with cURL from a command line:

curl 
  --header "Content-type: application/xml" 
  --request POST 
  --data '<name>Guillaume</name>' 
  http://localhost:9000/sayHello

It replies with:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 15

Hello Guillaume

§Serving an XML response

In our previous example we handle an XML request, but we reply with a text/plain response. Let’s change that to send back a valid XML HTTP response:

def sayHello = Action(parse.xml) { request =>
  (request.body \\ "name" headOption).map(_.text).map { name =>
    Ok(<message status="OK">Hello {name}</message>)
  }.getOrElse {
    BadRequest(<message status="KO">Missing parameter [name]</message>)
  }
}

Now it replies with:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 46

<message status="OK">Hello Guillaume</message>

Next: Handling file upload