Mutable NSHTTPURLResponse or NSURLResponse

Question

I need to modify response headers in an NSURLResponse. Is this possible?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem. I wanted to modify the header fileds of http url response. I needed it because wanted to provide cached url response to UIWebView and want to fool the web view that the response is not expired (i.e. I wanted to change "Cache-Control" property of the header but to keep the rest of the headers). My solution was to use NSKeyedArchiver to encode the original http response and to intercept the serialization with delegate. In

-(id) archiver:(NSKeyedArchiver*) archiver willEncodeObject:(id) object

I check if the object is NSDictionary and if so, I returned modified dictionary (i.e with updated "Cache-Control" header). Afterwards I just deserialized the serialized response using NSKeyedUnarchiver. Of course you may hook to the unarchiver and modify the headers in its delegate.

Note that in iOS 5 Apple has added

-(id)initWithURL:(NSURL*) url statusCode:(NSInteger) statusCode HTTPVersion:(NSString*) HTTPVersion headerFields:(NSDictionary*) headerFields

which is not in the documentation (documentation bug), but it is in the public API of NSHTTPURLResponse