Get HTTP header in JAX-RS

In this tutorial, we show you two ways to get HTTP request header in JAX-RS :

1. Inject directly with @HeaderParam
2. Pragmatically via @Context

Note
Refer to this wiki page for list of the HTTP header fields.

1. @HeaderParam Example

In this example, it gets the browser “user-agent” from request header.

import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.HeaderParam;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Response;

@Path("/users")
public class UserService {

 @GET
 @Path("/get")
 public Response addUser(@HeaderParam("user-agent") String userAgent) {

  return Response.status(200)
   .entity("addUser is called, userAgent : " + userAgent)
   .build();

 }

}


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Access via URI pattern “/users/get“, with FireFox, see following result :

addUser is called, userAgent : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0


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2. @Context Example

Alternatively, you can use @Context to get “javax.ws.rs.core.HttpHeaders” directly, see equivalent version to get browser “user-agent“.

import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Context;
import javax.ws.rs.core.HttpHeaders;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Response;

@Path("/users")
public class UserService {

 @GET
 @Path("/get")
 public Response addUser(@Context HttpHeaders headers) {

  String userAgent = headers.getRequestHeader("user-agent").get(0);
  
  return Response.status(200)
   .entity("addUser is called, userAgent : " + userAgent)
   .build();

 }

}


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Access via URI pattern “/users/get“, with Google Chrome, see following result :

addUser is called, userAgent : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/534.30 
 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.112 Safari/534.30


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List all request headers 
You can list all available HTTP request headers via following code :

for(String header : headers.getRequestHeaders().keySet()){
 System.out.println(header);
}