Responses

Responses are represented as instances of the case class Response[T], where T is the type of the response body. When sending a request, the response will be returned in a wrapper. For example, for asynchronous backends, we can get a Future[Response[T]], while for the default synchronous backend, the wrapper will be a no-op, Id, which is the same as no wrapper at all.

If sending the request fails, either due to client or connection errors, an exception will be thrown (synchronous backends), or an error will be represented in the wrapper (e.g. a failed future).

Note

If the request completes, but results in a non-2xx return code, the request is still considered successful, that is, a Response[T] will be returned. See response body specifications and/or handling non 2xx responses for details on how such cases are handled.

Response code

The response code is available through the .code property. There are also methods such as .isSuccess or .isServerError for checking specific response code ranges.

Response headers

Response headers are available through the .headers property, which gives all headers as a sequence (not as a map, as there can be multiple headers with the same name).

Individual headers can be obtained using the methods:

def header(h: String): Option[String]
def headers(h: String): Seq[String]

There are also helper methods available to read some commonly accessed headers:

def contentType: Option[String]
def contentLength: Option[Long]

Finally, it’s possible to parse the response cookies into a sequence of the Cookie case class:

def cookies: Seq[Cookie]

If the cookies from a response should be set without changes on the request, this can be done directly; see the cookies section in the request definition documentation.

Obtaining the response body

The response body can be obtained through the .body: Either[String, T] lazy value or the .rawErrorBody: Either[Array[Byte], T] property. T is the body deserialized as specified in the request - see the next section on response body specifications.

The response body is an either as the body can only be deserialized if the server responded with one of the expected status codes (by default it’s any 2xx code). Otherwise, the response body is most probably an error message.

Hence, response.body will be a:

  • Left(errorMessage) if the request is successful, but response code is not expected (non 2xx by default).
  • Right(deserializedBody) if the request is successful and the response code is expected (2xx by default).

To learn how to obtain non 2xx response body see this section.

You can also forcibly get the deserialized body, regardless of the response code and risking an exception being thrown, using the response.unsafeBody method.