6 Essential Ways to Read Request Parameters in Spring Boot

When developing APIs with Spring Boot, reading request parameters is a fundamental operation, and Spring Boot provides multiple mechanisms to satisfy different design requirements. This article summarizes six common ways to read request parameters.

@RequestParam

The most frequently used annotation for loading query parameters that appear after the “?” in a URL.

@GetMapping("/user")
@ResponseBody
public User findUserByName(@RequestParam("name") String name) {
    return userRepo.findByName(name);
}

@PathVariable

Commonly used in RESTful APIs to load parameters embedded in the URL path.

@GetMapping("/user/{id}")
@ResponseBody
public User findUserById(@PathVariable("id") String id) {
    return userRepo.findById(id);
}

@MatrixVariable

Less common, used by some systems to handle parameters separated by semicolons in the URL.

@GetMapping("/books/reviews")
@ResponseBody
public List<BookReview> getBookReviews(@MatrixVariable String isbn, @MatrixVariable Integer topN) {
    return bookReviewsLogic.getTopNReviewsByIsbn(isbn, topN);
}

@RequestBody

Used to load complex request bodies (payloads) for POST or PUT requests.

@PostMapping("/add")
public boolean addAccounts(@RequestBody List<Account> accounts) throws SQLException {
    accounts.stream().forEach(a -> {
        a.setCreatedOn(Timestamp.from(Instant.now()));
        a.setLastLogin(Timestamp.from(Instant.now()));
    });
    return notificationLogic.addAccounts(accounts);
}

@RequestHeader

Loads data from HTTP request headers, useful for passing metadata such as distributed tracing IDs.

@GetMapping("/user")
@ResponseBody
public List<User> getUserList(@RequestHeader("Authorization") String authToken) {
    return userRepo.findAll();
}

@CookieValue

Retrieves values from cookies, enabling stateful interactions with the client.

@GetMapping("/user")
@ResponseBody
public List<User> getUserList(@CookieValue(name = "SessionId") String sessionId) {
    return userRepo.findAll();
}

That concludes the overview of these request‑parameter extraction techniques in Spring Boot.