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ScalaActions
Most of the requests received by a Play application are handled by an Action
.
A play.api.mvc.Action
is basically a (play.api.mvc.Request => play.api.mvc.Result)
function that handles a request and generates a result to be sent to the client.
val echo = Action { request =>
Ok("Got request [" + request + "]")
}
An action returns a play.api.mvc.Result
value, representing the HTTP response to send to the web client. In this example Ok
constructs a 200 OK response containing a text/plain response body.
The play.api.mvc.Action
companion object offers several helper methods to construct an Action value.
The first simplest one just takes as argument an expression block returning a Result
:
Action {
Ok("Hello world")
}
This is the simplest way to create an Action, but we don't get a reference to the incoming request. It is often useful to access the HTTP request calling this Action.
So there is another Action builder that takes as an argument a function Request => Result
:
Action { request =>
Ok("Got request [" + request + "]")
}
It is often useful to mark the request
parameter as implicit
so it can be implicitly used by other APIs that need it:
Action { implicit request =>
Ok("Got request [" + request + "]")
}
The last way of creating an Action value is to specify an additional BodyParser
argument:
Action(parse.json) { implicit request =>
Ok("Got request [" + request + "]")
}
Body parsers will be covered later in this manual. For now you just need to know that the other methods of creating Action values use a default Any content body parser.
A Controller
is nothing more than a singleton object that generates Action
values.
The simplest use case for defining an action generator is a method with no parameters that returns an Action
value :
package controllers
import play.api.mvc._
object Application extends Controller {
def index = Action {
Ok("It works!")
}
}
Of course, the action generator method can have parameters, and these parameters can be captured by the Action
closure:
def hello(name: String) = Action {
Ok("Hello " + name)
}
For now we are just interested in simple results: An HTTP result with a status code, a set of HTTP headers and a body to be sent to the web client.
These results are defined by play.api.mvc.SimpleResult
:
def index = Action {
SimpleResult(
header = ResponseHeader(200, Map(CONTENT_TYPE -> "text/plain")),
body = Enumerator("Hello world!")
)
}
Of course there are several helpers available to create common results such as the Ok
result in the sample above:
def index = Action {
Ok("Hello world!")
}
This produces exactly the same result as before.
Here are several examples to create various results:
val ok = Ok("Hello world!")
val notFound = NotFound
val pageNotFound = NotFound(<h1>Page not found</h1>)
val badRequest = BadRequest(views.html.form(formWithErrors))
val oops = InternalServerError("Oops")
val anyStatus = Status(488)("Strange response type")
All of these helpers can be found in the play.api.mvc.Results
trait and companion object.
Redirecting the browser to a new URL is just another kind of simple result. However, these result types don't take a response body.
There are several helpers available to create redirect results:
def index = Action {
Redirect("/user/home")
}
The default is to use a 303 SEE_OTHER
response type, but you can also set a more specific status code if you need one:
def index = Action {
Redirect("/user/home", status = MOVED_PERMANENTLY)
}
You can use an empty Action
implementation defined as TODO
: the result is a standard ‘Not implemented yet’ result page:
def index(name:String) = TODO
Next: HTTP Routing
- Actions, Controllers and Results
- HTTP routing
- Manipulating results
- Session and Flash scopes
- Body parsers
- Actions composition
- HTTP programming
- Asynchronous HTTP programming
- The template engine
- HTTP form submission and validation
- Working with JSON
- Working with XML
- Handling file upload
- Accessing an SQL database
- Using the Cache
- Calling WebServices
- Integrating with Akka
- Internationalization
- The application Global object
- Testing your application