Support Restemplate.getForObject(resource,MyDto[].class) on HAL +JSON [DATAREST-819]

Christian Bongiorno opened DATAREST-819 and commented

Currently, to get a collection of resources that are in a HAL+JSON payload you need this code:

@Autowired
private RestOperations ops;

    ResponseEntity<PagedResources<MyDto>> entity = ops.exchange(
                location.expand(0, 20).getHref(), GET, null, new ParameterizedTypeReference<PagedResources<MyDto>>() {
                });
        PagedResources<MyDto> resources = entity.getBody();
        Collection<MyDto> dtos = resources.getContent();

Which returns an immutable Collection. That's fine, but it's clunky syntax to get around Java's type erasure. Supporting this simpler approach but achieve the same effect:

@Autowired
private RestOperations ops;

MyDto[] dtos = ops.getForObject(resource,MyDto[].class);

This works fine for classic JSON arrays of data and doesn't have the ugly type erasure work around; the type of the array is easy enough to get with reflection

Affects: 2.4.4 (Gosling SR4)