Custom Annotations with Retrofit 2
In some cases it would be nice to have custom annotation support in retrofit2. A year ago I started to write a library in which I needed this feature. In this article I will explain how to achieve and implement this.
UPDATE: There’s an updated and more detailed version of this article using Kotlin:
Why do you need custom annotations?
I guess in most cases you don’t need to use custom annotations, but interceptors. Since retrofit2 is based on okhttp, you can use interceptors (in retrofit 1.X this was supported by retrofit itself, too). But what does it do? Well, basically every request you call (using retrofit2 or plain okhttp) calls all setup interceptors before executing requests. The Interceptor is an interface which contains only one method to implement, called (surprise ^^) intercept, which get’s an object of Chain to proceed.
How to use Interceptor?
You can use Chain to execute
return chain.proceed(chain.request()); // returns Responseor modify request and execute
Request request = chain.request().newBuilder()
// modify the request as you need it
.build();chain.proceed(request);
the next upcoming request.
This setup applies for ALL requests that run with the okhttp client in which you setup these interceptors.
