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Redirect webpage after having sent some content

I am working with a web framework (uPortal) that is handling errors by just throwing an exception and then hanging. The framework works by rendering XML into HTML. When there is an exception, the browser recieves rendered content up to the XML template element that is failing, and then the browser just sits and waits for a timeout. Our team's theory is that the content is sent before the error occurs, which surprised me. Other frameworks I've worked with seem to finish rendering before sending content.
My question is, is there a way to redirect the browser after content has already been sent? In this case, we are in the middle of rendering the content of a <script> tag, but the error could occur potentially anywhere in the html.
My only current thought is to inject some javascript at the top of the page, and to try to change the framework's behavior to fail quickly and close the connection and add </body> and </html> tags when an error occurs. Then the above mentioned javascript would run on pageload and detect if the entire page's content was there and do a client-side redirect if not. Maybe it could look for a special hidden div at the bottom of the page.
Are there any examples of frameworks solving this problem differently or of people using similar framework working around this issue?

You must either capture the error, or capture the output in a buffer. If you can handle the exception, you can probably print a simple script tag like
<script> window.location.href = 'some_new_url';</script>
If the browser understands the doctype to be something related to HTML, it will execute that tag.
If you can capture the output in a buffer, when you handle the error you can decide to send an HTTP redirect to the browser and destroy the output buffer up to that point.
As for other frameowrks, in PHP, you can simply enable output buffering with ob_start(), which won't start sending content until the request is fully completed.

I don't know that framework, but
In http, every response has a response-code associated with it. Since the page is already half-way transferred / rendered that status code (usually "200") was sent (and received) already.
There's no way for the browser to accept another response code (like "301" for redirect) for the same response! Also the server is not able to send another response code, because the original response code was already commited and sent to the client.
Your description of the error and knowledge of the http-protocol implies that there is probably some implementation error in the framework / server components used, OR it was done deliberatly, risking the situation that you are in now...

to redirect a page , you need to set redirect information in header. but you can write header once you start writing content ( may be header is already received by client by the time you compete writing whole document )
But, you can do it in different way as below
1.let document loading complete and record if you need to redirect the page while rendering
2. add a unique request-id identifier for each page load
3. invoke ajax call with request-id ( may be rest call) to server asking if page needs to be redirected.
4. if page needs to be redirected , do so, via javascript in browser at client end.

A HTTP response consists of headers and an optional response content.
Once you have started to write the response to the socket connection you can't revert it. In your example: If you run into an error in the middle of content generation you can't add a redirect header - the header section has already be written.
The statement above is not entirely true: in HTTP chunked transfer encoding the response is sent in separate chunks. The last chunk can have an optional trailer containing entity-header fields and theoretically a redirect header. But if you can use these mechanism is a different question. For instance a servlet container may use chunked transfer encoding but does not give you an API to set the trailer.
But writing must not start immediately: For instance HttpServletResponse maintains a buffer for the response content. If you set headers and start writing the content only the buffer is filled and you still can reset the response and start all over. But once the buffer overflows the response is written to the connection and the HttpServletResponse is now committed.
Such a mechanism gives you way to deal with errors during content generation which happen when the response is not yet committed: Just reset the response and send an error message instead. You could examine your framework if it supports such an mechanism. But obviously this is not a solution for larger responses.
A second way to avoid errors during content generation is simply to make sure that they can't happen. First gather all your data needed for the response (e.g. making unsafe database calls), then in a second step generate the response - the second now step should not fail (except if you have bugs in your code).
You already mentioned a third way to handle an error, by having the client sanitize the response and take some action it errors are detected (e.g. by including a script in the generated HTML response).

The only reliable way to do this is to create a proxy HttpServletResponse object that caches the response. You'd need to give the uPortal this proxy instead of the actual HttpServletResponse, and only send the output using the real response once the processing completes / send redirect if the processing fails.
It is HTTP protocol design limitation that you cannot send HTTP redirect once output was started.
Other possible ways rely on HTML or Javascript redirects, but since you write that the error may happen at any moment, it would be difficult to print it out in a way that the browsers would reliably interpret it as redirect.

Java servlet, respond after recieving each request before queuing

I am using Java servlets using Apache tomcat.
I've configured a threadpool and am dealing with each request.
My page is taking in many GET requests at the same time, I'm wondering if I can respond to the server after each get request before any of the logic happens?
So server gives me a request -> I respond with either 'good send another' or 'bad send another' before I start my queueing.
Any help would be much appreciated!
EDIT
Sorry that was terribly written :(
What I'm asking for is a way to send a Header to the client (in this case it's a server which sends me lots of requests). The response would just be 200 or error based on the information I get sent.
What my program is doing:
My servlet gets sent lots of GET requests from one client. (over 100,000) Which I am using tomcat to queue and put into a threadpool. It is then assigned to a worker thread which processes it and puts it into a database.
I've been told to do is send a request back to that server saying 'ok received it'. I think I can use a header response but I don't have the URL of that client (and the client can change for different campaigns). So was wondering what the best way would be to send that response.
After doing some more research I think what I'm looking for is ServletOutputStream.
response.setContentType("text/html");
ServletOutputStream output = response.getOutputStream();
output.flush();
output.close();
Using servlet output stream where do I set the <head><body> tag? and insert the header response afterwards.

The simple answer is "sure".
If these are get requests from a web page for a web page, include a refresh timer and send back some token that can be used to identify the difference between a first-time-request and an I-requested-earlier-are-you-done request. In this case the refresh timer can be set via a meta refresh tag.
If the get requests are part of a REST API then you can define "got it and I'm working" into the protocol. For instance, return a 202 to indicate "got it but not done" and return 200 to indicate "done". As with the html page, consider sending some token back with the 202 that identifies the pending request.

Java - send HTTP POST request without downloading all the content

Is it possible to send HTTP POST request to a webserver and retrieve just headers of response or read just few bytes of the body, so the rest won't be downloaded at all (so it won't consume traffic)? If yes, how?
I know that there is a HEAD method for this, but I need to achieve it by POST method .. well, I am not sure if I need the POST method, I just need to post the data. Maybe if the webserver isn't secured well enough (it doesn't check what method it's used - it's just directly access the post data), is it possible to send "post data" by HEAD request?

There is no built-in HTTP mechanism for this, and HTTP HEAD requests do not allow content in the body. If however you are the one writing the server code then anything is possible.
If this is the case, I would suggest a URL parameter that triggers this behavior. For example:
POST /myURL - This would return the whole response
POST /myURL?body=minimal - Returns the reduced size response that you are looking for.
And you would have to code your server method to construct and return the appropriate response based on the URL parameter.

What's the proper way to return a file as the response?

Basically I need to provide REST service that would receive a String param, use that param to fetch a file from another system and then return the fetched file back as the response.
The effect should be the same as when a user clicks on a pdf or any other binary file link and the browser prompts him to save/download that file.
A couple of points:
is it possible to stream the file (to send bytes as I receive them from source system). In other words, how to handle very large files?
also related to streaming, when using regular HttpServletResponse, do I have to wait until a large file is completely read to return response.build()?
How do I go around doing this using Apache Wink?
PS Sorry, this may be trivial for Wink gurus, but I'm just starting to wrap my head around developer guide.

You can just return the java.io.File from your method. You can wrap it with Response if you like. Wink will handle the streaming. The streaming doesn't start when you call to response.build(), but rather when your method finishes.
If you want a correct download dialog, you should return the proper Content-Disposition header. See How to set response header in JAX-RS so that user sees download popup for Excel?

Play-Framework & Ajax how to?

I'm looking to do the following with AJAX...
I have a request to my server that takes a considerable amount of time to complete. The request is made in the controller and upon completion a HTML page is loaded informing the user of its completion.
However, what I'd like to do is have the request sent asynchronously, load the completion page and then load the requests result once it become available. I assume I would use AJAX to do this but I'm not exactly sure how. Can anyone point me to a good guide for doing something like this?
In case my explanation above is too confusing here is what I want to do...
1) Send request to server from Controller asyncronously.
2) load HTML page.
3) When request has completed fill field in already loaded HTML page with the response from the request.

I wrote a tutorial recently that walks through how to do this with Play 1.2, JSON, and jQuery:
Tutorial: Play Framework, JPA, JSON, jQuery, & Heroku

There are 2 parts you need to take into account here:
The client side
The server side
For the client side; an Ajax request (for example, using jQuery.ajax) is per definition asynchronous. This means that you should be able to do the following - again using jQuery, which makes things easier - in your HTML page:
// The ready handler, which fires when the page has been loaded
$(function() {
jQuery.ajax(
// Do your thing here
);
});
For the server side; in case your operation is going to be running for a relatively long time on the server (for instance several web service calls or long running IO operations) you'll want to use Play's asynchronous capabilities to let the Play! server execute things as effeciently as possible. It does this by offloading the long running operation(s) to their own threads.
The only thing left to do is set-up a route to your controller, implement the handler method and render something that your client-side JavaScript code is capable of parsing (JSON is probably the easiest, using Play's renderJson()).
I haven't used this set-up myself - maybe someone can confirm this would be the way to do it?