How to set the content type for a GET request from a browser

[Rahul Babbar]

Hi Ranchers,

Is there a way by which we can set the content type while accessing from a browser?

like when i am accessing, http://localhost:8080/something , i want to set the content type also.

I am able to do it from the java code but still need to see if it can be done from the browser.

Thank you

[Paul Sturrock]

Not sure I understand your question, the content type of the response is defined by the server? What is it you are trying to achieve?

Some browsers (such as IE) will try to perform content type sniffing if none is defined in the response. It's very difficult to tailor this behaviour, you would need to update a whole bunch of stuff in the registry to do it.

[William Brogden]

I think the browser depends on the context to set the request content type options in the Accept headers.

Try the Live HTTP Headers tool with firefox to see exactly what your browser is sending in the request.

Bill

[Rahul Babbar]

Paul Sturrock wrote:Not sure I understand your question, the content type of the response is defined by the server? What is it you are trying to achieve?

Hi Paul,

The requirement is that the clients can ask for the JSON or the XML version of a record or a set of records using a GET request. So i was thinking to set the content-type requested by the GET request so that the servlet can convert the data object into either JSON or XML.
Normally, when from a browser, we do a http://localhost:8080/appName/servletName, its a GET request but no content-type is set.

However the same can be set through a Java client to make a GET request like

 connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json");   

and the same can be obtained in the servlet as

 String contentType = request.getContentType();   

So, i was wondering if there was a way to set this property from the browser(but not a request parameters)

Thank you

[Paul Clapham]

If you want the server to produce one of two formats based on something in the request, the obvious thing to do is to pass a parameter defining the format. This has the advantage that you don't have to do weird things like hacking the browser to make it work, it is just a standard feature of HTML.

[William Brogden]

Note: Content-type in a request refers to the type of the data you are sending!

It is the Accept header that gives the type you want.

Here is the Wikipedia convenient page for HTTP headers.

Bill

[Rahul Babbar]

Oh...you are right Bill,

i was confused between the two.

I think i will go ahead with the way suggested by Paul to pass the parameter in the request instead.

Thank you

Rahul

[David Newton]

Or consider using the extension of the request as a response type indicator, like "foo.json" returns JSON, "foo.xml" returns XML, "foo.jsp" returns HTML.

[Rahul Babbar]

Hi David,

I am using Jersey framework for this and eventually i want the requests like foo.json or foo.xml to go to a single method in the Servlet, but i am not sure whether if my urls are different in these cases(foo.json or foo.xml), how will jersey handle the request and how will i read the ".json" part.

Also, i think Jersey provides an annotated way of handling both xml and json in the same method using jaxb but i am not using it because of some other related complexities. so i am using a custom way to convert object to xml or json

Thank you

[William Brogden]

i want the requests like foo.json or foo.xml to go to a single method

Why in the name of sanity would you want that? It seems to me that the whole idea of jersey is to direct the request to the method designed to return a specific type as set by the annotation.

You are just headed for mass confusion.

See this JAX-RS overview.

Bill

[Rahul Babbar]

i have a large no of methods written for returning the XML type data, and repeating the code for all the methods just because of a different type of data conversion doesn't look good to me.

Because after some other time, a different content type requirement might come, and i dont want to rewrite all the methods just because the content type is different(unless the business logic requires some different processing for different content type)

So, what i am having right now, is that i get my data object from the backend to the jersey servlet and then based on the request parameter convert it to either JSON or XML(and that code is common).

Also, it looks like with Jersey, we can specify 2 or more content types for the same method, and that seems to be ok for what i am trying to do.

Thank you