Chapter 21. Custom Injection and Lifecycle Management

Jersey implementation allows you to directly inject HttpServletRequest instance into your JAX-RS components. It is quite straight forward to get the appropriate HttpSession instance out of the injected request instance. Let say, you want to get HttpSession instance directly injected into your JAX-RS types like in the code snippet below.

@Path("di-resource")
public class MyDiResource {

    @Inject HttpSession httpSession;

    ...

}

To make the above injection work, you will need to define an additional HK2 binding in your application ResourceConfig. Let's start with a custom HK2 Factory implementation that knows how to extract HttpSession out of given HttpServletRequest.

import org.glassfish.hk2.api.Factory;
    ...

    public class HttpSessionFactory implements Factory<HttpSession> {

    private final HttpServletRequest request;

    @Inject
    public HttpSessionFactory(HttpServletRequest request) {
        this.request = request;
    }

    @Override
    public HttpSession provide() {
       return request.getSession();
    }

    @Override
    public void dispose(HttpSession t) {
    }
}

Please note that the factory implementation itself relies on having the actual HttpServletRequest instance injected. In your implementation, you can of course depend on other types (and inject them conveniently) as long as these other types are bound to the actual HK2 service locator by Jersey or by your application. The key notion to remember here is that your HK2 Factory implementation is responsible for implementing the provide() method that is used by HK2 runtime to retrieve the injected instance. Those of you who worked with Guice binding API in the past will most likely find this concept very familiar.

Once implemented, the factory can be used in a custom HK2 Binder to define the new injection binding for HttpSession. Finally, the implemented binder can be registered in your ResourceConfig:

import org.glassfish.hk2.utilities.binding.AbstractBinder;
...

public class MyApplication extends ResourceConfig {

    public MyApplication() {

        ...

        register(new AbstractBinder() {
            @Override
            protected void configure() {
                bindFactory(HttpSessionFactory.class).to(HttpSession.class);
            }
        });
    }
}

Note that we did not define any explicit injection scope for the new injection binding. By default, HK2 factories are bound in a HK2 PerLookup scope, which is in most cases a good choice and it is suitable also in our example.

To summarize the approach described above, here is a list of steps to follow when implementing custom injection provider in your Jersey application :

While the Factory-based approach is quite straight-forward and should help you to quickly prototype or even implement final solutions, you should bear in mind, that your implementation does not need to be based on factories. You can for instance bind your own types directly, while still taking advantage of HK2 provided dependency injection. Also, in your implementation you may want to pay more attention to defining or managing injection binding scopes for the sake of performance or correctness of your custom injection extension.

Java annotations are a convenient way for attaching metadata to various elements of Java code. Sometimes you may even decide to combine the metadata with additional functionality, such as ability to automatically inject the instances based on the annotation-provided metadata. The described scenario is one of the use cases where having means of defining a custom injection annotation in your Jersey application may prove to be useful. Obviously, this use case applies also to re-used existing, 3rd-party annotation types.

In the following example, we will describe how a custom injection annotation can be supported. Let's start with defining a new custom SessionInject injection annotation that we will specifically use to inject instances of HttpSession (similarly to the previous example):

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.FIELD)
public @interface SessionInject { }

The above @SessionInject annotation should be then used as follows:

@Path("di-resource")
public class MyDiResource {

    @SessionInject HttpSession httpSession;

    ...

}

Again, the semantics remains the same as in the example described in the previous section. You want to have the actual HTTP Servlet session instance injected into your MyDiResource instance. This time however, you expect that the httpSession field to be injected must be annotated with a custom @SessionInject annotation. Obviously, in this simplistic case the use of a custom injection annotation is an overkill, however, the simplicity of the use case will help us to avoid use case specific distractions and allow us better focus on the important aspects of the job of defining a custom injection annotation.

If you remember from the previous section, to make the injection in the code snippet above work, you first need to implement the injection provider (HK2 Factory) as well as define the injection binding for the HttpSession type. That part we have already done in the previous section. We will now focus on what needs to be done to inform the HK2 runtime about our @SessionInject annotation type that we want to support as a new injection point marker annotation. To do that, we need to implement our own HK2 InjectionResolver for the annotation as demonstrated in the following listing:

import javax.inject.Inject;
import javax.inject.Named;

import javax.servlet.http.HttpSession;

import org.glassfish.hk2.api.InjectionResolver;
import org.glassfish.hk2.api.ServiceHandle;

...

public class SessionInjectResolver implements InjectionResolver<SessionInject> {

    @Inject
    @Named(InjectionResolver.SYSTEM_RESOLVER_NAME)
    InjectionResolver<Inject> systemInjectionResolver;

    @Override
    public Object resolve(Injectee injectee, ServiceHandle<?> handle) {
        if (HttpSession.class == injectee.getRequiredType()) {
            return systemInjectionResolver.resolve(injectee, handle);
        }

        return null;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean isConstructorParameterIndicator() {
        return false;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean isMethodParameterIndicator() {
        return false;
    }
}

The SessionInjectResolver above just delegates to the default HK2 system injection resolver to do the actual work.

You again need to register your injection resolver with your Jersey application, and you can do it the same was as in the previous case. Following listing includes HK2 binder that registers both, the injection provider from the previous step as well as the new HK2 inject resolver with Jersey application ResourceConfig. Note that in this case we're explicitly binding the SessionInjectResolver to a @Singleton scope to avoid the unnecessary proliferation of SessionInjectResolver instances in the application:

import org.glassfish.hk2.api.TypeLiteral;
import org.glassfish.hk2.utilities.binding.AbstractBinder;

import javax.inject.Singleton;

...

public class MyApplication extends ResourceConfig {

    public MyApplication() {

        ...

        register(new AbstractBinder() {
            @Override
            protected void configure() {
                bindFactory(HttpSessionFactory.class).to(HttpSession.class);

                bind(SessionInjectResolver.class)
                    .to(new TypeLiteral<InjectionResolver<SessionInject>>(){})
                    .in(Singleton.class);
            }
        });
    }
}

The last use case discussed in this chapter will cover managing custom-scoped components within a Jersey application. If not configured otherwise, then all JAX-RS resources are by default managed on a per-request basis. A new instance of given resource class will be created for each incoming request that should be handled by that resource class. Let say you want to have your resource class managed in a per-session manner. It means a new instance of your resource class should be created only when a new Servlet HttpSession is established. (As with previous examples in the chapter, this example assumes the deployment of your application to a Servlet container.)

Following is an example of such a resource class that builds on the support for HttpSession injection from the earlier examples described in this chapter. The PerSessionResource class allows you to count the number of requests made within a single client session and provides you a handy sub-resource method to obtain the number via a HTTP GET method call:

@Path("session")
public class PerSessionResource {

    @SessionInject HttpSession httpSession;

    AtomicInteger counter = new AtomicInteger();

    @GET
    @Path("id")
    public String getSession() {
        counter.incrementAndGet();
        return httpSession.getId();
    }

    @GET
    @Path("count")
    public int getSessionRequestCount() {
        return counter.incrementAndGet();
    }
}

Should the above resource be per-request scoped (default option), you would never be able to obtain any other number but 1 from it's getReqs sub-resource method, because then for each request a new instance of our PerSessionResource class would get created with a fresh instance counter field set to 0. The value of this field would get incremented to 1 in the the getSessionRequestCount method before this value is returned. In order to achieve what we want, we have to find a way how to bind the instances of our PerSessionResource class to HttpSession instances and then reuse those bound instances whenever new request bound to the same HTTP client session arrives. Let's see how to achieve this.

To get better control over your Jersey component instantiation and life cycle, you need to implement a custom Jersey ComponentProvider SPI, that would manage your custom components. Although it might seem quite complex to implement such a thing, the component provider concept in Jersey is in fact very simple. It allows you to define your own HK2 injection bindings for the types that you are interested in, while informing the Jersey runtime at the same time that it should back out and leave the component management to your provider in such a case. By default, if there is no custom component provider found for any given component type, Jersey runtime assumes the role of the default component provider and automatically defines the default HK2 binding for the component type.

Following example shows a simple ComponentProvider implementation, for our use case. Some comments on the code follow.

import javax.inject.Inject;
import javax.inject.Provider;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpSession;
...
import org.glassfish.hk2.api.DynamicConfiguration;
import org.glassfish.hk2.api.DynamicConfigurationService;
import org.glassfish.hk2.api.Factory;
import org.glassfish.hk2.api.PerLookup;
import org.glassfish.hk2.api.ServiceLocator;
import org.glassfish.hk2.utilities.binding.BindingBuilderFactory;
import org.glassfish.jersey.server.spi.ComponentProvider;

@javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider
public class PerSessionComponentProvider implements ComponentProvider {

    private ServiceLocator locator;

    static class PerSessionFactory implements Factory<PerSessionResource>{
        static ConcurrentHashMap<String, PerSessionResource> perSessionMap
                = new ConcurrentHashMap<String, PerSessionResource>();


        private final Provider<HttpServletRequest> requestProvider;
        private final ServiceLocator locator;

        @Inject
        public PerSessionFactory(
                Provider<HttpServletRequest> request,
                ServiceLocator locator) {

            this.requestProvider = request;
            this.locator = locator;
        }

        @Override
        @PerLookup
        public PerSessionResource provide() {
            final HttpSession session = requestProvider.get().getSession();

            if (session.isNew()) {
                PerSessionResource newInstance = createNewPerSessionResource();
                perSessionMap.put(session.getId(), newInstance);

                return newInstance;
            } else {
                return perSessionMap.get(session.getId());
            }
        }

        @Override
        public void dispose(PerSessionResource r) {
        }

        private PerSessionResource createNewPerSessionResource() {
            final PerSessionResource perSessionResource = new PerSessionResource();
            locator.inject(perSessionResource);
            return perSessionResource;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void initialize(ServiceLocator locator) {
        this.locator = locator;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean bind(Class<?> component, Set<Class<?>> providerContracts) {
        if (component == PerSessionResource.class) {

            final DynamicConfigurationService dynamicConfigService =
                locator.getService(DynamicConfigurationService.class);
            final DynamicConfiguration dynamicConfiguration =
                dynamicConfigService.createDynamicConfiguration();

            BindingBuilderFactory
                .addBinding(BindingBuilderFactory.newFactoryBinder(PerSessionFactory.class)
                .to(PerSessionResource.class), dynamicConfiguration);

            dynamicConfiguration.commit();

            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }

    @Override
    public void done() {
    }
}

The first and very important aspect of writing your own ComponentProvider in Jersey is to store the actual HK2 ServiceLocator instance that will be passed to you as the only argument of the provider initialize method. Your component provider instance will not get injected at all so this is more less your only chance to get access to the HK2 runtime of your application. Please bear in mind, that at the time when your component provider methods get invoked, the ServiceLocator is not fully configured yet. This limitation applies to all component provider methods, as the main goal of any component provider is to take part in configuring the application's ServiceLocator.

Now let's examine the bind method, which is where your provider tells the HK2 how to bind your component. Jersey will invoke this method multiple times, once for each type that is registered with the actual application. Every time the bind method is invoked, your component provider needs to decide if it is taking control over the component or not. In our case we know exactly which Java type we are interested in (PerSessionResource class), so the logic in our bind method is quite straightforward. If we see our PerSessionResource class it is our turn to provide our custom binding for the class, otherwise we just return false to make Jersey poll other providers and, if no provider kicks in, eventually provide the default HK2 binding for the component. Please, refer to the HK2 documentation for the details of the concrete HK2 APIs used in the bind method implementation above. The main idea behind the code is that we register a new HK2 Factory (PerSessionFactory), to provide the PerSessionResource instances to HK2.

The implementation of the PerSessionFactory is is also included above. Please note that as opposed to a component provider implementation that should never itself rely on an injection support, the factory bound by our component provider would get injected just fine, since it is only instantiated later, once the Jersey runtime for the application is fully initialized including the fully configured HK2 runtime. Whenever a new session is seen, the factory instantiates and injects a new PerSessionResource instance. The instance is then stored in the perSessionMap for later use (for future calls).

In a real life scenario, you would want to pay more attention to possible synchronization issues. Also, we do not consider a mechanism that would clean-up any obsolete resources for closed, expired or otherwise invalidated HTTP client sessions. We have omitted those considerations here for the sake of brevity of our example.