Send a path containing slashes in Kotlin Spring mappings

Question

Having trouble dealing with slashes in controller mappings in Kotlin Spring. My client application sends an absolute path ("C:/User/Documents/FolderX"), and should receive the content of the path's folder.

The request should look like this: http://localhost:8080/api/files/C:/User/Documents/FolderX

And I want to have access solely to the path/string "C:/User/Documents/FolderX".

Tried this at first:

@RestController
@RequestMapping("api/files")
class FileController(private val service: FileService)
{
    @GetMapping("/{path:.*}")
    fun retrieveFiles(@PathVariable path: String): MutableList<xFile> = service.retrieveFiles(path)
}

Which gives error code 404

Then tried this:

@RestController
@RequestMapping("api/files")
class FileController(private val service: FileService)
{
    @GetMapping("/**")
    fun retrieveFiles(@PathVariable path: String, request: HttpServletRequest): MutableList<xFile>
    {
        val thePath = request.getAttribute(HandlerMapping.PATH_WITHIN_HANDLER_MAPPING_ATTRIBUTE).toString();
        val bestMatchingPattern = request.getAttribute(HandlerMapping.BEST_MATCHING_PATTERN_ATTRIBUTE).toString();

        val arguments = AntPathMatcher().extractPathWithinPattern(bestMatchingPattern, thePath)

        val moduleName: String

        if (!arguments.isEmpty())
        {
            moduleName = (path + '/') + arguments
        }
        else
        {
            moduleName = path
        }

        return service.retrieveFiles(moduleName)
    }
}

Which gives this error (code 500):

Resolved [org.springframework.web.bind.MissingPathVariableException: Required URI template variable 'path' for method parameter type String is not present]

Answer 1

Using base64 encoding/decoding I was able to get it to work correctly.

@RestController
@RequestMapping("api/files")
class FileController(private val service: FileService)
{
    @GetMapping("/{encodedPath}")
    fun retrieveFiles(@PathVariable encodedPath: String): MutableList<xFile>
    {
        val decodedBytes = Base64.getDecoder().decode(encodedPath)
        val decodedString = String(decodedBytes)

        return service.retrieveFiles(decodedString)
    }
}

Then we just use a split or substring on decodedString to obtain the part of the path that we need!