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HAL Browser is a tool built from the creator of the HAL Specification. There are a few tweaks that are made to integrate seamlessly with Spring Boot
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All right, so for an example of something
that's using that metadata that we
0:00
just saw, let's take a look at
the HAL browser which again stands for
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hypermedia application language.
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Now the HAL browser requires
an extra dependency, but
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I think you'll find it worthwhile
in your exploration phase.
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So let's open up build.gradle.
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And let's add this dependency.
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So we'll say,
compile org.springframework.data.
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We'll do spring-data-rest-hal-browser.
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Not to be confused with that.
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Open the pod bay door cell.
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Okay, so we're gonna go over and
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refresh our gradle.
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Awesome, and
then let's restart the server.
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Boom.
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And now if we go just to the root of
our web page, what's gonna happen is,
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we're going to see a brand new browser.
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Now, this is super cool.
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So, what this allows us to do is,
it's exploring those links, right?
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So, those underscore links that we were
seeing before, this is what it's showing.
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And it's letting us just go ahead and
navigate using HAL.
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So let's go ahead and let's look at,
so see here reviews and
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reviews are over here in courses and
courses over here.
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So if we go ahead and
we do a get here, it will go ahead and
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help us specify what we wanna do.
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So we can say page 2 of courses and
we want the page list to be 10 and
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you'll see that it's showing
us what the URI is gonna do.
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If you click Follow URI,
it will build that actual page up here.
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So here it is.
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Here's the response body and
down here are the embedded courses.
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And if you go and you can click,
you can open one of these up and
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you can go and
look at the reviews for that.
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Let me look at the first review here and
got a 3 and they wanted more spring and
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you can just click around it all, right?
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So if we go ahead,
let's go back to the entry point here.
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Let's go to the front.
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And again the links that
were provided here.
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So we were clicking get before
to walk through this but
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we can also do non get requests ,right.
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So let's go ahead, let's add 1.
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Let's add a new thing here.
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So we'll perform a non-GET request.
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And look at this,
it's using what we did, right?
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So we're creating a collection
of online courses.
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Here is the title,
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here's the name of course, so it's using
that meta data that we just put in.
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And it's automatically labeling the fields
to be more descriptive for what it is.
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Pretty slick right, so let's go ahead
let's do Java objects a look right there.
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And we will do library/java-objects.
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And we're gonna do a post and it is too
small on this page to click unfortunately.
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Or let me see if I can,
there we go, Make Request.
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Boom and it gave us a 201 created.
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So my favorite thing about this
tool is that you can use it
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to expose clients writing
software to your API.
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And they can learn how things work and
what they need to do to get things up and
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running to use your API.
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I'm definitely gonna shoot
this over to our team, right?
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This is awesome.
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So these tools, right,
the postman and the HAL browser.
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There are good tools to use to
verify that you have things working.
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And remember thus far, the only thing we
really need to test is the spot check that
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we got things working like
we think they should behave.
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We don't need to write any tests for any
of this functionality because the spring
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data rest framework has
its own set of tests.
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And just like the functionality
wasn't our responsibility to write,
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testing that functionality isn't
our responsibility either.
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So I'm glad you got a chance to
check out a few of these tools.
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Check the teachers notes for more.
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Now that we have a couple
easy ways of viewing and
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setting headers,
let's go view a couple of features.
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