Some browsers send POST followed by GET requests

Question

My Servlet app. gets called twice every time the user submits a form: The first time with a POST request, and immediately after, with a GET request (both requests with the same URI).

This problem appears to be independent of the app server (I've tried with tomcat-6.0 and with resin.2.1).

The problem seems to be browser related: The problem does not occur with the MS Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 clients, but it does with Google Chrome-2.0 and with FireFox-3.0.11 clients.

The HTML code is trivial:

<form method="post" action="MyServlet?formSubmitted">
    <input type="text" name="data">
    <input type="submit" value="OK">
</form>

Could somebody explain such behaviour? Thanks in advance, Carlos

Answer 1

This looks very similar to this bug registered against Chrome. I would track this and find the resolution.

Answer 2

If you're convinced it isn't client-side JavaScript (and I appreciate that you took the time to simplify the test and verify), then the next thing I'd look for is a server-side redirect.

I believe that you're running on Windows (that's the only place Chrome exists, right?), so download the Fiddler tool (produced by MSDN). It will show you all the requests that happen between your client and server. If you see the POST getting a 302 response, that is an indication of a server-side redirect. monitoring

Answer 3

I have just had exactly the same problem and it turned out to be an tag with an empty src parameter in the new page that is rendered, this caused Firefox to do a get that looks the same as the original post.