Java servlet not writing response bytes

Question

I have a few Java servlets (3.x - Tomcat 8) running that generate and return PDF documents. I\'ve never had any problems with any of them. I recently wrote a new servlet to also

Answer 1

You're not flushing the BufferedOutputStream - so it's buffering all your data. You should flush that, not the ServletOutputStream.

However, if you're only writing a single byte array, there's no point in using BufferedOutputStream anyway - and you shouldn't need to explicitly flush anyway, as closing will flush. So you just need:

ServletOutputStream sos = response.getOutputStream();
sos.write(pdfBytes);
// Unclear whether *this* is needed, either.
sos.close();

I'd personally expect the servlet container to close the output stream, but it's not clear from the docs. Whether you want to close it if an exception occurs is a different matter...