HTTPAction expects XML responses

[zywind]

It seems HTTPAction expects XML responses. A lot of services today return JSON data. I think we should handle that. Also plain text responses. I am not sure what the API should look like though.

[mmberg]

One possibility would be to create new subclasses HttpXmlAction, HttpJsonAction, etc.
Another one would be to only have HTTPAction and add a new parameter "responseType" that allows to distinguish between XPath and a JSON-expression.
I will have a look at it...

[mmberg]

There is now an HttpJsonAction which can be used to access responses from RESTful web services.
If you want to access the result, just use JS notation like "title" or "object.name" or "array[0].title". Internally, we use https://github.com/jayway/JsonPath, so have a look there in case of questions about the syntax of the query. The "$." is automatically prepended.

If you want to use the old functionality of HTTPAction, you have to use HttpXpathAction now.

2c71a7e (development)

Will be merged with master after more testing.

[mmberg]

Added HttpTextAction for processing plain text responses. You can provide a regex as query to filter the response.
See f96c4ee

Examples (extracts):

HttpJsonAction:

HttpAction httpaction=new HttpJsonAction("My result is: #result");
httpaction.setUrl("http://freemusicarchive.org/api/get/genres.json");
httpaction.setMethod("get");
httpaction.setParams("api_key=60BLHNQCAOUFPIBZ&limit=2");
httpaction.setQuery("dataset[0].genre_color");
task.setAction(httpaction);

TextAction:

HttpTextAction httpaction=new HttpTextAction("My result is: #result");
httpaction.setUrl("https://www.example.com/");
httpaction.setMethod("get");
httpaction.setQuery("coo.{5}");
task.setAction(httpaction);