1. Home
2. Working with Play
3. Play for Scala developers
4. Main concepts
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