Enhancement Proposal: *Context.cacheControl()

[mkarg]

Recently we deprecated CacheControl.valueOf(String), but the replacement is a rather clumsy code line: RuntimeDelegate.getInstance().createHeaderDelegate(CacheControl.class).fromString(value). This is very annoying e. g. when migrating filters from 2.x to 3.x.

To make the programmer's life easier, I like to propose that we add support for some syntactic sugar:

• Add new method cacheControl() on Client/Server Request/Response Context returning a modifiable instance of CacheControl initialized by the content of the Cache-Control header.

[jamezp]

I'd agree that is pretty clumsy. There could be a reason, but why weren't the method calls simply changed to use that long form instead of deprecating the methods?

The CacheControl type itself is rather out of date. The current HTTP RFC for caching is RFC 9111. This is kind of a broader issue in the REST spec in general though having references to long obsolete RFC's.

[mkarg]

I don't know the actual reason why deprecating CacheControl.valueOf(String) months ago, but in fact it is deprecated now, so IMHO we cannot simply remove the deprecation state and change the implementation. 🤔

Nevertheless, I think programmers would be more happy about ctx.cacheControl() than with CacheControl.valueOf(ctx.getHeaderString(HttpHeaders.CACHE_CONTROL)).

Regarding RFC 9111 I think we should separate adding syntactic sugar (this PR) from supporting newer RFCs (separate OR).

[mkarg]

Kindly asking for more opinions. If nobody vetos ctx.cacheControl() upfront, I will provide a PR plus a compliant implementation (PR for Jersey) in the next weeks.

[spericas]

@mkarg Could you link the PR that deprecated the valueOf method? I can't recall how we got there.

[mkarg]

@mkarg Could you link the PR that deprecated the valueOf method? I can't recall how we got there.

https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/pull/608/files#diff-afeba8f9ca4f7cce75662eac8255baeacc627b3f6383ad001ff5bfa1c65a57a1L86

[mkarg]

There had been not upfront vetos, so I assume everybody is fine with adopting this enhancement. If not, please clearly tell me NOW. Thanks.