Develop Reference

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.

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?

Is it possible to access the html of a site with a 204 response code via java.net?

I am trying to read a website using the java.net package classes. The site has content, and i see it manually in html source utilities in the browser. When I get its response code and try to view the site using java, it connects successfully but interprets the site as one without content(204 code). What is going on and is it possible to get around this to view the html automatically.
thanks for your responses:
Do you need the URL?
here is the code:
URL hef=new URL(the website);
BufferedReader kj=null;
int kjkj=((HttpURLConnection)hef.openConnection()).getResponseCode();
System.out.println(kjkj);
String j=((HttpURLConnection)hef.openConnection()).getResponseMessage();
System.out.println(j);
URLConnection g=hef.openConnection();
g.connect();
try{
kj=new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(g.getInputStream()));
while(kj.readLine()!=null)
{
String y=kj.readLine();
System.out.println(y);
}
}
finally
{
if(kj!=null)
{
kj.close();
}
}
}

Suggestions:
Assert than when manually accessing the site (with a web browser client) you are effectively getting a 200 return code
Make sure that the HTTP request issued from the automated (java-based) logic is similar/identical to that of what is sent by an interactive web browser client. In particular, make sure the User-Agent is identical (some sites purposely alter their responses depending on the agent).
You can use a packet sniffer, maybe something like Fiddler2 to see exactly what is being sent and received to/from the server
I'm not sure that the java.net package is robot-aware, but that could be a factor as well (can you check if the underlying site has robot.txt files).
Edit:
assuming you are using the java.net package's HttpURLConnection class, the "robot" hypothesis doesn't apply.
On the other hand you'll probably want to use the connection's setRequestProperty() method to prepare the desired HTTP header for the request (so they match these from the web browser client)
Maybe you can post the relevant portions of your code.

Problem occured when using OutputStream & (DataOutPutStream or PrintWriter)

I wrote a simple server using java socket programming and intended to make that offered 2 files for download and display some html response when the download finished. What I did is use PrintWriter.print or DataOutPutStream.writeBytes to send the string including html tags and response string to the browser, then use OutputStream.write to send the file requested. The URL I typed in the browser was like 127.0.0.1/test1.zip, relevant code fragments as following:
pout.print("<html>");
pout.print("<head>");
pout.print("<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1/\">");
pout.print("<title>Response</title>");
pout.print("</head>");
pout.print("<body>");
pout.print(createResponseHeader(200, fileTypeCode));
pout.print("</body>");
pout.print("</html>");
pout.print(createResponseHeader(200, fileTypeCode));
pout.flush();
byte[] buffer = new byte[client.getSendBufferSize()];
int bytesRead = 0;
System.out.println("Sending...");
while((bytesRead = requestedFile.read(buffer))>-1)
{
out.write(buffer,0,bytesRead);
}
The pout is a PrintWriter while out is OutputStream.
The problem is when I try to use 127.0.0.1/test2.zip to download the file, it doesn't let me download, instead, print out the response string and a lot of non-sense character in the browser, e.g.
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Connection: close
Server: COMP5116 Assignment Server v0
Content-Type: application/x-zip-compressed
PK‹â:Lmá^ЛàÍ test2.wmvì[y<”Ûÿ?3ÃØ—Ab¸eeË’5K"»±f_B*à Å*YÛ•¥M5h±¯u[(\·(-÷F)ß3ÏɽݺÝ×ýýñ{Íg^ÏûyžóYÏçœçyÎç¼P’>™îÝ+½Žö6A€;;ýmüH»êt©k]R#*€.G‰µÅRÏøÍLÔóZ; ´£åÑvP¹æª#õó”æÇ„‹&‡ëî9q‰Ú>LkÇÈyÖ2qãÌÆ(ãDŸã©ïÍš]Ð4iIJ0Àª3]B€ðÀ¸CôÁ`ä è1ü½¤Ã¬$ pBi
I believe it simply display the zip file as string with the response header all together. It seems once the PrintWriter is used before the code of sending the file, the whole output stream is used for sending string instead of bytes. However, if I put the part of code of sending the response AFTER the code of sending file, the download works properly but no any response message print out in the browser, just a blank page.

You've to remove your HTML code from here and send only the binary data. You can't mix them in a single servlet.
To achieve what you want to do is not easy.
I would start the download with some JavaScript code in the page, then the page will poll with Ajax for a server side servlet that will know if the download is completed for that particular session. In fact there is no download completed event in JavaScript.
To have this information the download servlet will update the session with a flag when download is completed.
When your Ajax call will return that the download is completed, you can change the text in the page or redirect to a new page.
Edit: Alternatively, if you can change your requirements, it will be much easier to show all messages that you have to show just before the download, and put target="_blank" in the download link so your page is not lost by clicking on the link.

Url redirect after click and downloading a file

My goal is to redirect or refresh my page while downloding excel file :
Details :
In my application i am sending dynamically generated excel file
setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel; charset=windows-1254");
setCharacterEncoding(Constants.ENCODING);
setHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename=" + Constants.DEFAULT_EXCEL_FILE);
setHeader("Location","http://www.google.com");
But after asking user to save or open excel file, it didn't redirect to ex : google.com.
Is it possible to do it in header part ? If yes please say how .
Thanks.

This is simply isn't possible for the reason that the defined behavior of the browser is bound to be vague. In other words, when the browser notes the presence of two headers, each with possibly conflicting requirements, then the behavior might be to simply ignore one, instead of obeying both - it is upto the browser vendor to define this.
In this particular case, the Content-Disposition and the Location HTTP headers are conflicting, more so because if the browser were to process the Location header first resulting in the redirection, the end-user would never be prompted for the file download.
On an additional note, the Location header would only make sense for a HTTP 302 response (I believe that this is not the case in your application, not that it might help).

You could use some JavaScript for the job
<a href="myfile.txt" onclick='window.location = 'http://www.google.com/';">
File
</a>

you cannot redirect,because you have flushed out the response stream.

This is one option, not in header part tough
private void DownloadFile()
{
//Download file here...
//Refresh this page.
this.Response.Redirect(Request.Url.AbsolutePath);
}