Question

I’m trying to set a header in the response object after I call

chain.doFilter()

However, the header does not get set. Does control ever come back to the doFilter() method after a call to chain.doFilter()?

Answer 1

However, the header does not get set.

That can happen if the response is already committed (read: when the first part of the response, including all headers, are already been sent to the client; this is a point of no return). A bit sane servletcontainer would throw an IllegalStateException on any attempt to set a header on an already committed response. This should be visible in the server logs. Have you read them?

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Does control ever come back to the doFilter() method after a call to chain.doFilter()?

You could easily check it yourself by placing a breakpoint or a sysout/logger line. But yes, surely the control comes back the usual Java way and the remaining lines will be executed, provided that there’s no uncaught exception coming from the doFilter() call.

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Coming back to your concrete functional requirement, you’d need to rewrite your code in such way that the header is been set before the response is ever committed. As the concrete functional requirement is not elaborated in any way, it’s not possible to give some hints or kickoff examples in this answer. The most straightforward way would be to just set the header before calling doFilter().