sendRedirect after flush without IllegalStateException.

[Serghei Jelauc]

Hi all.
It is very strange, but I do not have IllegalStateException in my servlet when I call res.sendRedirect("") method after flushing OutputStream.
Here is my code:

package servlets;
 
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import java.io.*;
 
public class FlushServlet extends HttpServlet {
 
public void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res) throws ServletException, IOException {
 
res.setContentType("application/jar");
InputStream is = this.getServletContext().getResourceAsStream("/data/tools.jar");
byte [] b = new byte[1024];
OutputStream os = res.getOutputStream();
while((is.read(b)) != -1) {
 
os.write(b, 0, b.length);
 
}
os.flush();
os.close();
is.close();
res.sendRedirect("http://www.javaranch.com");
 
}
 
}  

I've tryed it on Tomcat and on Weblogic - the result is the same - I have not been redirected, but I have downloaded file and there wasn't exception.
Could someone explain me why?

Thanks in advance?
[ February 23, 2005: Message edited by: Serghei Jelauc ]

[Adeel Ansari]

all i wanna say is, read the docs.

[Adeel Ansari]

Here it is.

sendRedirect

Sends a temporary redirect response to the client using the specified redirect location URL. This method can accept relative URLs; the servlet container must convert the relative URL to an absolute URL before sending the response to the client. If the location is relative without a leading '/' the container interprets it as relative to the current request URI. If the location is relative with a leading '/' the container interprets it as relative to the servlet container root.

If the response has already been committed, this method throws an IllegalStateException. After using this method, the response should be considered to be committed and should not be written to.

- it is from J2EE Docs

[Sim Kim]

See the tomcat logs . You will see the exception there .