👀 Views: 10 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-08-07

spring-boot rest requestparam java

I'm trying to implement I'm working on a personal project and I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm working with a peculiar scenario in my Spring Boot REST API where I have an endpoint that accepts several parameters via `@RequestParam`. When I send a request with some parameters being `null`, the behavior is not what I expect. Instead of receiving a default value, it seems to ignore those parameters altogether, leading to unexpected results in my service logic. My method signature looks like this: ```java @GetMapping("/items") public ResponseEntity<Item> getItems( @RequestParam(value = "category", required = false) String category, @RequestParam(value = "sort", required = false, defaultValue = "name") String sort ) { // Service logic here } ``` When I call this endpoint with the following request: ``` GET /items?category=null&sort=price ``` I expect `category` to be `null` and `sort` to be `"price"`. However, it seems that `category` is treated as an empty string instead of `null`, leading to logic in my service that assumes there’s a valid category. I've tried using `required = false`, and even default values, but I need to seem to get the behavior to match my expectations. I've read through the Spring documentation but need to find clarity on how to handle this specific case. Is there a way to differentiate between a parameter that was explicitly set to `null` and one that wasn't provided at all? Any insights or workarounds would be greatly appreciated! Has anyone else encountered this? This is part of a larger application I'm building. This is my first time working with Java 3.10. Could someone point me to the right documentation? What are your experiences with this? I'm using Java LTS in this project. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I'm working with Java in a Docker container on Ubuntu 22.04. Any feedback is welcome!