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Manipulating Results

Changing the default Content-Type

The result content type is automatically inferred from the Scala value that you specify as the response body.

For example:

@content-type_text

Will automatically set the Content-Type header to text/plain, while:

@content-type_xml

will set the Content-Type header to application/xml.

Tip: this is done via the play.api.http.ContentTypeOf type class.

This is pretty useful, but sometimes you want to change it. Just use the as(newContentType) method on a result to create a new similar result with a different Content-Type header:

@content-type_html

or even better, using:

@content-type_defined_html

Note: The benefit of using HTML instead of the "text/html" is that the charset will be automatically handled for you and the actual Content-Type header will be set to text/html; charset=utf-8. We will [[see that in a bit|ScalaResults#Changing-the-charset-for-text-based-HTTP-responses]].

Manipulating HTTP headers

You can also add (or update) any HTTP header to the result:

@set-headers

Note that setting an HTTP header will automatically discard the previous value if it was existing in the original result.

Setting and discarding cookies

Cookies are just a special form of HTTP headers but we provide a set of helpers to make it easier.

You can easily add a Cookie to the HTTP response using:

@set-cookies

Also, to discard a Cookie previously stored on the Web browser:

@discarding-cookies

You can also set and remove cookies as part of the same response:

@setting-discarding-cookies

Changing the charset for text based HTTP responses

For a text based HTTP response it is very important to handle the charset correctly. Play handles that for you and uses utf-8 by default (see why to use utf-8).

The charset is used to both convert the text response to the corresponding bytes to send over the network socket, and to update the Content-Type header with the proper ;charset=xxx extension.

The charset is handled automatically via the play.api.mvc.Codec type class. Just import an implicit instance of play.api.mvc.Codec in the current scope to change the charset that will be used by all operations:

@full-application-set-myCustomCharset

Here, because there is an implicit charset value in the scope, it will be used by both the Ok(...) method to convert the XML message into ISO-8859-1 encoded bytes and to generate the text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Type header.

Now if you are wondering how the HTML method works, here it is how it is defined:

@Source-Code-HTML

You can do the same in your API if you need to handle the charset in a generic way.

Range Results

Play supports part of RFC 7233 which defines how range requests and partial responses works. It enables you to deliver a 206 Partial Content if a satisfiable Range header is present in the request. It will also returns a Accept-Ranges: bytes for the delivered Result.

Note: Besides the fact that some parsing is done to better handle multiple ranges, multipart/byteranges is not fully supported yet.

Range results can be generated for a Source, InputStream, File, and Path. See RangeResult API documentation for see all the methods available. For example:

@range-result-input-stream

Or for an Source:

@range-result-source

When the request Range is not satisfiable, for example, if the range in the request's Range header field do not overlap the current extent of the selected resource, then a HTTP status 416 (Range Not Satisfiable) is returned.

It is also possible to pre-seek for a specific position of the Source to more efficiently deliver range results. To do that, you can provide a function where the pre-seek happens:

@range-result-source-with-offset