REST client to get link URI's "dynamically" via rel="" values.

[Andreas Svenkson]

Hi guys.

I have coded a REST webservice client, that interacts with a service that provides JSON-formatted resources. While my code is working fine, I would like to further decouple it from the actual REST-API structure in the way that HATEOAS is generally meant to be done.
I should add that I am using Jersey 2 for the interaction with the webservice, and thus a general resource-query against the service would like as follows:

Client client = ClientBuilder.newClient();
WebTarget resource = client.target("rest url");

Now, the next step is usually to request and read the resource at the targeted location as such

Response r = resource.request("application/json").get();

Or alternatively, to process the returned data (and this is the way I have consistently done it in my code thus far):

InputStream is = resource.request("application/json").get(InputStream.class);
... <then further processing of the data by parsing the JSON from the InputStream>

However.... I am positive that other than that kind of processing, I should also be able to "traverse" the webservice application by means of the links contained in the response.
It should work like this:

Response r = t.request("application/json").get();
Link link1 = r.getLink("relation of the link I want to find");

.. However this does not work. This is despite that I can confirm that the resource has links in it.
The returned resource has the following JSON format:

{
	"name" : "object",
	"type" : "type",
	"properties" : {
		<bunch of meta properties>
	},
	"links" : [{
			"rel" : "self",
			"href" : "http:// <self url>"
		}, {
			"rel" : "contents",
			"href" : "http:// <content url>"
		}, 
		... <a whole bunch of more links>
	]
}

As you can see there are clearly some links in the returned resource, and yet, a call to getLinks() consistently returns an empty Set<Link>.

Does anyone know how to configure Jersey to successfully let me extract link URI's this way from a Response object?

// Andreas