An Action in Play defines how a server should respond to a request. The methods, which define an Action, are mapped to a request in the routes file. For example, let's define an Action which displays the information of all the artists as a response:

def listArtist = Action {
  Ok(views.html.home(Artist.fetch))
}

Now, to use this Action, we should map it to a request in the routes file.

GET     /api/artist       controllers.Application.listArtist

In this example, we fetch all the artists and send them with the view, as the response to the request.

Run the application and access http://localhost:9000/api/artist from the browser. A table with the available artist is visible.

Action takes a request and yields a result. It is an implementation of the EssentialAction trait. It is defined as:

trait EssentialAction extends (RequestHeader => Iteratee[Array[Byte], Result]) with Handler {
 
  def apply() = this

...