Java Tomcat web form submission tries to download foo.do entry text/x-server-parsed-html

Question

Web form submssion tries to download foo.do (for example). This downloaded form is the "thanks for submitting" the user normally sees after submission. The email that this page sends comes through OK.

Both the shtml from which the form is submitted and the response that tries to download have a meta content tag of text/html.

I havent got access to the classfile yet to see what my dev is doing and the Apache httpd directive that send stuff to Tomcat AJP13 haven't changed.

I've got a feeling that it's either in the class file that processes the request or in the web.xml file. Either a missing filter or an improper/dodgy process by the class handling foo.do.

Is this likely to be a server misconfiguration or a error in Java code?

Answer 1

It's the browser that is trying to "download" the response, not the server.

With that said, the browser acts this way based on the response headers sent by the server - if the response is truly text/html make sure that the server is sending Content-Type: text/html in the response headers (values of the <meta> html tag won't matter here, because the browser isn't even considering the response as html).

Answer 2

et voila!

<mime-mapping>
        <extension>shtml</extension>
        <mime-type>text/x-server-parsed-html</mime-type>
    </mime-mapping>

was defined in the C_B/conf/web.xml changed that to text/html in my application web.xml

:)