Why is HttpServletRequest inputstream empty?

Question

I have this code where I read the input from a request input stream and use a JacksonMapper to convert into a POJO. Its running in a jetty 7 container with guice support.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem running a Spring Boot application. My Spring Boot app is a simple Dispatcher servlet that reads the request body and processes it.

In my case, the client (curl) sets a content-type header of application/x-www-form-urlencoded if the curl command line uses -d {some-data} and does not set an specific content-type header via -Hcontent-type=some-other-media-type.

Inside the Apache Catalina servlet engine that Spring Boot runs, the Request class makes the following test in parseParameters()

        if (!("application/x-www-form-urlencoded".equals(contentType))) {
            success = true;
            return;
        }

For other content-type values, Request returns here, done.

However, if the content type matches application/x-www-form-urlencoded, Request continues:

    try {
       if (readPostBody(formData, len) != len) {           
            parameters.setParseFailedReason(FailReason.REQUEST_BODY_INCOMPLETE);
            return;
        }
    } catch (....)

which will consume the body. So in my case, even though my servlet does nothing other than call request.getInputStream() and try to read() from it, it is already too late - the runtime Request already reads the input and does not buffer or unread it. The only workaround is to set a different Content-Type.

The culprit is OrderedHiddenHttpMethodFilter(HiddenHttpMethodFilter).doFilterInternal(HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse, FilterChain) line 70

which is looking for the "_method" query parameter.

I was able to disable the filter by adding

@Bean
public FilterRegistrationBean registration(HiddenHttpMethodFilter filter) {
    FilterRegistrationBean registration = new FilterRegistrationBean(filter);
    registration.setEnabled(false);
    return registration;
}

(which was used to solve another problem)