Custom JAX-RS Providers

The custom ExceptionMapper demonstrated in the previous section is a custom JAX-RS provider. Custom MessageBodyReader, MessageBodyWriter and ExceptionMapper providers are most often used.

Custom MessageBodyReader and/or MessageBodyWriter is needed when the JAX-RS runtime needs to read the request messages which has the format not understood or mapped to/from Java classes in a way not supported by by its default readers and writers. Writing a custom reader and writer is not a complex process. For example, a custom MessageBodyReader should be able to answer if it supports reading a message with given MediaType into an object instance of some specific type; if the response is yes then the runtime will ask the provider to read the message from the given input stream.