Play! Framework -- Parsing JSON

tl;dr

I suggest using ObjectMapper found in the com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper

    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
    try {
        JsonNode root = request().body().asJson();
        JsonNode jsonPhoneNumbers = root.get("phoneNumbers");
        for(JsonNode phoneNumberString : jsonPhoneNumbers) {
            String phoneNumber = phoneNumberString.asText();
        }
    catch (NullPointerException npe) {
        // No valid phone numbers were provided
    }

Using ObjectMapper

For parsing arrays in JSON requests, I suggest using the ObjectMapper. Assuming you have a request that looks like:

    {
        "phoneNumbers": [
            "555-555-5555",
            "555-555-5556",
            "555-555-5557"
        ]
    }

We can easily access the phone number values by using ObjectMapper class. The first thing that you’d want to do is instantiate an instance of this class, which is pretty straight forward.

    
    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

From there, we want a JSON version of our request, the Play framework allows you to easily do so by chaining the asJson() method to the request().body() functions.

    
    JsonNode root = request().body().asJson();

Using the get() function on our root object and providing the correct key, we can easily get our phoneNumbers as a JsonNode, which is also iterable. By iterating through each of the JsonNode objects, we can just return the value for the corresponding phone number as a String by using the asText() method.

    
    JsonNode jsonPhoneNumbers = root.get("phoneNumbers");
    for(JsonNode phoneNumberString : jsonPhoneNumbers) {
        String phoneNumber = phoneNumberString.asText();
    }

Since there is a possibility that the request could be empty (null), I suggest wrapping the request processing in a try-catch block. If a request is null or the specified key was not included in the request (in this example it would be phoneNumbers) then we can use the catch portion of the block to easily return a bad request.

Put this all together looks like:

    import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonNode;
    import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
    import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.node.ObjectNode;
    import play.libs.Json;

    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
    ObjectNode response = Json.newObject();
    try {
        JsonNode root = request().body().asJson();
        JsonNode jsonPhoneNumbers = root.get("phoneNumbers");
        for(JsonNode phoneNumberString : jsonPhoneNumbers) {
            String phoneNumber = phoneNumberString.asText();
        }
    catch (NullPointerException npe) {
        // No valid phone numbers were provided
        response.put("status", 400);
        response.put("message", "No phone numbers were provided");
        return badRequest(response);
    }