HttpURLConnection redirects my POST request into a GET

http, httpurlconnection, java, playframework, playframework-1.x

Solution

This is the default behavior of Java. You can change it by setting the system property http.strictPostRedirect=true.

For details, please see this quote from the Java source HttpURLConnection implementation source:

    /* The HTTP/1.1 spec says that a redirect from a POST 
     * *should not* be immediately turned into a GET, and
     * that some HTTP/1.0 clients incorrectly did this.
     * Correct behavior redirects a POST to another POST.
     * Unfortunately, since most browsers have this incorrect
     * behavior, the web works this way now.  Typical usage
     * seems to be:
     *   POST a login code or passwd to a web page.
     *   after validation, the server redirects to another
     *     (welcome) page
     *   The second request is (erroneously) expected to be GET
     * 
     * We will do the incorrect thing (POST-->GET) by default.
     * We will provide the capability to do the "right" thing
     * (POST-->POST) by a system property, "http.strictPostRedirect=true"
     */

Problem

I'm sending a `HttpURLConnection` with `setInstanceFollowRedirects(true)` and `POST`, get a redirect response that looks like this: ``` HTTP/1.1 302 Found Server: nginx Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:47:56 GMT Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Transfer-Encoding: chunked Connection: keep-alive Status: 302 Found Status: 301 Moved Permanently Location: http://foo.bar/... ``` And the next request that the JVM sends is a `GET` request (to the correct, redirected URL). It also seems to drop one of the HTTP headers I added to the original request. FYI, I'm not using `HttpURLConnection` directly, but rather through Play Framework's WS wrapper. My question is - is this a known issue with Java (Sun JVM 1.7.0)? Or could it be a bug in Play Framework?

Original source