WebClient's ResponseSpec should provide access to response headers

[csabakos]

Affects: 5.1.4

---

This in an enhancement request for WebClient.

Currently there are two ways to process the response with WebClient:

1. WebClient#exchange() gives full access to the ClientResponse (including the HTTP response headers), but it requires one to handle erroneous HTTP status codes manually.
2. WebClient#retrieve() simplifies error handling, but prevents access to ClientResponse.

I find myself using retrieve() almost exclusively, but sometimes I have to resort to exchange() (and doing my own error handling) due to the limitation described above.

It would be really nice for WebClient#retrieve() to provide access to ClientResponse (or at least the HTTP response headers) while still taking care of the bad status code handling.

An example use case of this is extracting a value from a HTTP header or a cookie in addition to deserializing the body to an object.

A potential implementation of this could be to add Mono<ClientResponse> clientResponse(); to WebClient.ResponseSpec. DefaultResponseSpec would call .cache() on the responseMono in the constructor, and return that from the new clientResponse() method.

That would allow one to write something like:

WebClient.ResponseSpec responseSpec = webClient.get().uri("http://...").retrieve();
responseSpec.bodyToMono(MyObject.class)
    .zipWith(responseSpec.clientResponse())
    .map((body, clientResponse) -> {
        // Access clientResponse.headers(), etc.
    }
    ...

An alternative solution could be to simply make DefaultResponseSpec public, so that one could do this manually:

Mono<ClientResponse> clientResponseMono = webClient.get().uri("http://...").exchange().cache();
new DefaultResponseSpec(clientResponseMono)
    .bodyToMono(MyObject.class)
    .zipWith(clientResponseMono)
    .map((body, clientResponse) -> {
        // Access clientResponse.headers(), etc.
    }
    ...

[rstoyanchev]

Caching the response isn't an option, and it wouldn't cover the Flux case either. Having to break the fluent chain of calls with a WebClient.ResponseSpec local var isn't ideal either. Making WebClient.DefaultResponseSpec public has the same issue.

@poutsma we considered bodyToMonoEntity and bodyToFluxEntity methods on ResponseSpec at some point. Was there some technical reason it couldn't be done?

[poutsma]

At some point, we moved the toEntity methods from ResponseSpec to ClientResponse because that made more sense: both client response and response entity represent the entire HTTP message (status, headers and body), while response spec focusses on the body only. I still think this was a good decision.

But we could expose the response headers in WebClient.ResponseSpec by adding something like:

<T,R> Mono<R> bodyMonoWithHeaders(Class<T> bodyType, BiFunction<HttpHeaders, Mono<T>, Mono<R>> function);
<T,R> Flux<R> bodyFluxWithHeaders(Class<T> bodyType, BiFunction<HttpHeaders, Flux<T>, Flux<R>> function);

I am not sure about the names yet, but the idea should be clear: you get access to both headers and body mono/flux in a function. We might even consider exposing the status code as well.

This would allow you to do the following:

Mono<String> result = this.webClient.get()
	.uri("/greeting")
	.retrieve()
	.bodyMonoWithHeaders(String.class, (headers, body) -> body.map(s -> s + " " + headers.getContentType()));

Thoughts?

[csabakos]

@poutsma that makes sense to me and would cover my use case perfectly.

The only thing that it might not cover is easy access to cookies. I suppose one could always parse cookies from the headers, but ClientResponse#cookies() is a lot more convenient.