How to set read and connect time outs?

[Ravisankar-Challa]

No description provided.

[andymc12]

Good question. In JAX-RS 2.0, read and connect timeouts were set in the Client API using implementation-specific properties - i.e. ClientBuilder.newBuilder().property("com.ibm.ws.jaxrs.client.connection.timeout", 20000)...

In JAX-RS 2.1, the expert group added the connectTimeout and readTimeout to the ClientBuilder class to avoid the user needing to use proprietary (non-portable) properties.

MP Rest Client is based on JAX-RS 2.0, so we could allow implementations of the spec to use those same properties from their JAX-RS 2.0 implementation. Or we could follow suit with JAX-RS 2.1 and add the timeout methods to RestClientBuilder.

Anybody have any strong opinions or alternative options?

[johnament]

I would recommend leaving them as implementation specific properties, since we support registering properties. When we bump to the next version and JAX-RS 2.1 we can align to the methods added in JAX-RS 2.1

[dansiviter]

This issue might be mitigated somewhat if there was a way to unwrap an instance of the javax.ws.rs.client.ClientBuilder from within the org.eclipse.microprofile.rest.client.RestClientBuilder. At the moment some rather untidy reflection is needed to extract and set. SmallRye tries to map ReSTEasy methods to the #property method but as the method signature of the timeout methods is a long and TimeUnit that makes is somewhat more complicated (see #18).

[andymc12]

@dansiviter I was just thinking about coming back to this issue.

Not all implementations use the ClientBuilder as their underlying technology. I'm not sure about RestEasy, but I know that CXF avoids the ClientBuilder internally, so it would non-trivial to get the ClientBuilder from the generated proxy instance of the Rest Client.

Would it work for you if we added connectTimeout and readTimeout methods to the RestClientBuilder so that it would match JAX-RS 2.1's ClientBuilder?

[dansiviter]

The concern there is one specific implementation is having a direct impact on specifications for convenience and not for practical reasons. After all, "Rest Client attempts to use JAX-RS 2.0 APIs for consistency and easier re-use." (although in this case it would be JAX-RS 2.1 spec!). Yes, adding connectTimeout and readTimeout would address my specific use-case, but I'm not convinced it's the right thing to do.