How to use jackson with a web proxy

Question

I'm writing class to read from a JSON web service using Jackson. Previously, when reading from a web service I've used a custom web browser class to be able to set certain connection information, such as proxy host/port/username/password, etc as well as read and connection timeout values.

Is there a way to do this in Jackson natively? E.g. by setting the proxy parameters in a configuration?

Or should I revert back to getting the API response as a string and then using Jackson to parse it?

FYI, this is the (simplified) code that I am using.

URL configUrl = new URL("http://my.webservice.com/api");
ConfigClass localConfig = mapper.readValue(configUrl, ConfigClass.class);

Answer 1

I would retrieve the api response as a Reader (or InputStream), and then use Jackson to parse that. Jackson just calls configUrl.openStream() under the hood, and there's no reason not to do that yourself.

Answer 2

I think you should do the latter, proxy support hasn't been added to Jackson. Plus it's pretty simple, using the Proxy class.

Proxy proxy = new Proxy(Proxy.Type.HTTP, new InetSocketAddress("127.0.0.1", 8080));
URL url = new URL("URL");
HttpURLConnection uc = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection(proxy);
uc.connect();