Spring HATEOAS & HAL: Can I serve just Links but no content?

Question

What it says in the title.

I want to serve a root resource that consists only of links to the "lower" resources. It seems that Resource as well as HttpEntity want an object with some content as their type, so how can I serve just Links?

Thanks.

Munshi

Answer 1

So what you conceptually do is returning an empty collection resource with links attached. This can be achieved by this snippet of code:

List<Link> links = …
return new Resources<Object>(Collections.emptySet(), links);

Clarkia

Answer 2

I couldn't figure out which "Resources" that was and I wanted to return a proper HAL representation in order to make use of "/" as the entry point in HAL Explorer. This worked out for me:

return ResponseEntity.ok(new RepresentationModel<>()
    .add(linkTo(methodOn(SomeController.class).GET()).withRel("some-rel")));

Interactive