Question

Jersey client is not setting the “origin” header for me and I wonder if I am missing anything.

String origin="http://www.localhost.com";
ClientResponse response= webResourceBuilder("my/endpoint")
            .header( "origin" , origin)
            .header("Access-Control-Request-Method", "POST")
            .header("xorigin", origin)
            .header("whatever", "test")
            .accept("application/xml")
            .get(ClientResponse.class);

When I inspect at runtime the request headers on the server side, I find “xorigin” and “whatever” headers, but not “origin” and “Access-Control-Request-Method”

How can I set these headers?

Answer 1

Default Jersey client uses HttpURLConnection to send requests to the server. HttpUrlConnection restricts some headers to be sent in a request, see:

/*
 * Restrict setting of request headers through the public api
 * consistent with JavaScript XMLHttpRequest2 with a few
 * exceptions. Disallowed headers are silently ignored for
 * backwards compatibility reasons rather than throwing a
 * SecurityException. For example, some applets set the
 * Host header since old JREs did not implement HTTP 1.1.
 * Additionally, any header starting with Sec- is
 * disallowed.
 *
 * The following headers are allowed for historical reasons:
 *
 * Accept-Charset, Accept-Encoding, Cookie, Cookie2, Date,
 * Referer, TE, User-Agent, headers beginning with Proxy-.
 *
 * The following headers are allowed in a limited form:
 *
 * Connection: close
 *
 * See http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest2.
 */
private static final boolean allowRestrictedHeaders;
private static final Set<String> restrictedHeaderSet;
private static final String[] restrictedHeaders = {
    /* Restricted by XMLHttpRequest2 */
    //"Accept-Charset",
    //"Accept-Encoding",
    "Access-Control-Request-Headers",
    "Access-Control-Request-Method",
    "Connection", /* close is allowed */
    "Content-Length",
    //"Cookie",
    //"Cookie2",
    "Content-Transfer-Encoding",
    //"Date",
    //"Expect",
    "Host",
    "Keep-Alive",
    "Origin",
    // "Referer",
    // "TE",
    "Trailer",
    "Transfer-Encoding",
    "Upgrade",
    //"User-Agent",
    "Via"
};

You have two options how to handle this situation:

1. With the default Jersey client you need to set a system property

   -Dsun.net.http.allowRestrictedHeaders=true
   

   which suppresses removing restricted headers from the request.

2. Use ApacheHttpClient/ApacheHttpClient4 which doesn’t seem to have this restriction. Simply add one of the following dependencies to your project:

   <dependency>
       <groupId>com.sun.jersey.contribs</groupId>
       <artifactId>jersey-apache-client</artifactId>
       <version>1.15</version>
   </dependency>
   

   or

   <dependency>
       <groupId>com.sun.jersey.contribs</groupId>
       <artifactId>jersey-apache-client4</artifactId>
       <version>1.15</version>
   </dependency>
   

   and then create your client like:

   ApacheHttpClient.create(com.sun.jersey.api.client.config.ClientConfig);
   

   or

   ApacheHttpClient4.create(com.sun.jersey.api.client.config.ClientConfig);