Question

I’m using apache commons httpClient 3.0.1 and by default it sets the user agent to Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.0, I know to set a custom value but what I need now its to completly remove the User-Agent header from the request, i know that value comes from DefaultHttpParamsFactory.java

It’s there a way to change the behavior of that factory ? or to specify my own factory

Answer 1

One solution is to subclass the method and override the addUserAgentRequestHeader method. Something like this:

public class NoUserAgentGetMethod extends GetMethod {

    public NoUserAgentGetMethod(String uri) {
        super(uri);
    }

    @Override
    protected void addUserAgentRequestHeader(
            HttpState state, HttpConnection connection) {
        // do nothing
    }

}

As you noticed, you can only change the user agent value but not remove it entirely by modifying the parameters. This is because the HttpMethodBase class uses "Jakarta Commons-HttpClient" as the hard-coded default if no user agent value has been provided as a parameter.

Note that as mentioned in comments above, switching to the updated HttpClient codebase of the new Apache HttpComponents project would be a good idea going forward.