Why does Jersey swallow my “Content-Encoding” header

Question

Why does the following example swallow my HTTP-Header for \"Content-Encoding\" in the request. I am writing an application where I need to decode a custom encoding format. H

Answer 1

The problem you see is because you are effectively overwriting the Content-Encoding header with the

.post(Entity.text(QUESTION));

call. The Entity.text(...) method produces entity with the content data Variant fields set to:

media type = "text/plain";
content language = null;
content encoding = null;

These null values of content encoding and language in turn erase any previously set Content-Encoding or Content-Language headers. To fix this, you need to specify the content encoding as part of your entity:

    Response response = target(PATH)
            .request()
            .post(Entity.entity(QUESTION, 
                  new Variant(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN_TYPE, (String) null, "my-encoding")));

(I agree this behavior is somewhat confusing as it is not obvious. Perhaps we should fix Jersey to not override headers with null variant field values if set...)