Using JSON With Play and Scala

Once getting your hands into typing scala code using Play, the first thing that comes to mind is JSON.

Without a doubt, JSON is one of the most basic components of web applications. REST APIs use JSON, your angular app has to consume JSON... the list goes on.

If you are lazy like me, you expect that it is sufficient to just pass back Scala objects through your controller or specify a Scala class as an argument to your controller. Somehow, things don’t get far from that; however, some adjustments have to be done.

The first step is to specify the JSON module

libraryDependencies += json

The JSON library is pretty similar to the org.json library for java but with extra capabilities. The types we have out of the box are JsString, JsNumber, JsBoolean, JsObject, JsArray, and JsNull. 

However, the key functionality comes from the reads and writes converters, which can be used to marshal or unmarshal our data structures.

Suppose we have a class called User:

case class User(id:Option[Long],email:String,firstName:String,lastName:String)

We want to use this class to pass data to our controllers or use it as a response once our action has finished.

Thus, we need to create a Reader and writer for the User object.

  implicit val userWrites = new Writes[User] {
    def writes(user: User) = Json.obj(
      "id" -> user.id,
      "email" -> user.email,
      "firstName" -> user.firstName,
      "lastName" -> user.lastName
    )
  }

  implicit val userReads: Reads[User] = (
    (__ \ "id").readNullable[Long] and
      (__ \ "email").read[String] and
      (__ \ "firstName").read[String] and
      (__ \ "lastName").read[String]
    )(User.apply _)

Most probably, you’ve noticed that the id is optional. We do this in order to be able to either pass the id of the user or not.

Now, let’s put them together in a controller.

package controllers

import javax.inject.Inject

import com.google.inject.Singleton
import play.api.libs.json._
import play.api.mvc.{Action, Controller}
import play.api.libs.functional.syntax._

/**
  * Created by gkatzioura on 4/26/17.
  */
case class User(id:Option[Long],email:String,firstName:String,lastName:String)

@Singleton
class UserController @Inject() extends Controller {

  def all = Action { implicit request =>
    val users = Seq(
      User(Option(1L),"gkazoura@example.com","Emmanouil","Gkatziouras"),
      User(Option(2L),"john@doe.com","John","Doe"),
      User(Option(3L),"john2@doe.com","John2","Doe2")
    )
    Ok(Json.toJson(users))
  }

  def greet = Action

  def add = Action { implicit request =>

    val user  = Json.fromJson[User](request.body.asJson.get).get
    val newUser = User(Option(4L),user.email,user.firstName,user.lastName)
    Ok(Json.toJson(newUser))
  }

  implicit val userWrites = new Writes[User] {
    def writes(user: User) = Json.obj(
      "id" -> user.id,
      "email" -> user.email,
      "firstName" -> user.firstName,
      "lastName" -> user.lastName
    )
  }

  implicit val userReads: Reads[User] = (
    (__ \ "id").readNullable[Long] and
      (__ \ "email").read[String] and
      (__ \ "firstName").read[String] and
      (__ \ "lastName").read[String]
    )(User.apply _)
}

And also the roots configuration:

GET     /user/                   controllers.UserController.all
POST    /user/                   controllers.UserController.add

As we can see, the all method returns a list of user objects in JSON, format while the add method is supposed to persist a user object and assign an id  to it.

Let’s do a curl request and check our results

curl http://localhost:9000/user/

....

[{"id":1,"email":"gkazoura@example.com","firstName":"Emmanouil","lastName":"Gkatziouras"},{"id":2,"email":"john@doe.com","firstName":"John","lastName":"Doe"},{"id":3,"email":"john2@doe.com","firstName":"John2","lastName":"Doe2"}]

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"email":"emmanouil@egkatzioura.com","firstName":"Emmanouil","lastName":"Gkatziouras"}' http://localhost:9000/user/

...

{"id":4,"email":"emmanouil@egkatzioura.com","firstName":"Emmanouil","lastName":"Gkatziouras"}

So, we didn’t get into any special JSON handling or reading. Instead, we used only objects.

That’s it! Now, you are ready for more JSON-related action!