The link scheme's method signature might contain several parameters (such as bean, view, HttpServletRequest, ...) that will be automatically bound by the CAE framework on invocation. Furthermore, several classes are supported for the scheme's return type, for example org.springframework.web.util.UriComponents or even a Map<String,Object> that holds the URI variables only. See the Javadoc of the annotation com.coremedia.objectserver.web.links.Link for more details.

As a consequence, a link scheme can be implemented in several ways, for instance:

@Link(type = ContentBean.class, uri="/content/{id}")
public UriComponents buildLink(UriComponentsBuilder uriTemplate,
                               ContentBean bean) {

  Integer id = IdHelper.parseContentId(bean.getContent().getId());
  return uriTemplate.buildAndExpand(id);
}

or

@Link(type = ContentBean.class, uri="/content/{id}")
public Map<String, Object> buildLink(ContentBean bean) {

  Integer id = IdHelper.parseContentId(bean.getContent().getId());
  return Collections.singletonMap("id", id);
}

or

@Link(type = ContentBean.class)
public UriComponentsBuilder buildLink(ContentBean bean) {

  Integer id = IdHelper.parseContentId(bean.getContent().getId());
  return UriComponentsBuilder.newInstance()
                             .pathSegment("content")
                             .pathSegment(id.toString());
}

CoreMedia suggests using org.springframework.web.util.UriComponentsBuilder for building links since this utility provides convenience functions for manipulating URI parts as well as functions for substituting URI variables (such as {id}) by concrete values. In addition, an URI will be encoded (for example /öffnungszeiten to /%C3%B6ffnungszeiten) properly by using the UriComponents#encode() function. Moreover, CoreMedia suggests to return the resulting link as an UriComponents, UriComponentsBuilder or Map<String,Object> object. Post-processing (see below) of such values is much more efficient than for objects of type String or URI. As a side effect, it is not necessary to perform the encoding manually, because this is done by the framework.