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I've not used HttpClient myself, but I suspect that the problem is that putMethod.setEntity(...) is implicitly supplying a content length and you are also setting it explicitly via one of the putMethod.addHeader(...) calls.

Stephen C 2010-07-26 05:50:22

Exactly. You never have to set Content-Length yourself in Java unless you are using a plain Socket.

EJP 2010-07-26 05:54:42

@EJP - or the java.net URLConnection classes.

Stephen C 2010-07-26 05:57:49

No, they do it for you. You only have to set it if you *aren't* using those.

EJP 2010-07-26 09:08:40

@EJP - incorrect. With an HttpURLConnection, the **only** way to create an HTTP request with a body is for the application to call `getOutput()` and write to the resulting `OutputStream`. The implementation only knows how many bytes of content it is sending when the application closes the stream. By then it is to late to go back and write a "content-length" in the request header.

Stephen C 2010-07-26 10:57:34

Obviously you've never tried it. HttpURLConnection provides a ByteArrayOutputStream as he output stream, so it can do exactly that. Except in the case when you are in chunked transfer mode when it doesn't need to.

EJP 2010-07-26 12:57:59

@EJP - I use HttpURLConnection all the time. But I've always gone on what I've understood the javadoc to mean.

Stephen C 2010-07-26 13:30:24

Fair enough, but the Javadoc doesn't say it can't build its own Content-Length header, and it also says 'In the common case, all of the pre-connection parameters and general request properties can be ignored: the pre-connection parameters and request properties default to sensible values. For most clients of this interface, there are only two interesting methods ...'

EJP 2010-07-27 03:59:13

Thanks for the help guys. I found the source for 4.1 and of course you are right. However, it seems you either could or should in 3.x. Not sure which...

AdamC 2010-07-27 05:37:34

Btw - I was able to verify this by setting a request interceptor (at the end) and looking at the modified request. It shows the Content-Length already set.

AdamC 2010-07-28 04:05:12

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Content-Length header already present

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