How do delete a HTTP response header?

Daniel picture Daniel · Oct 25, 2011 · Viewed 42.8k times · Source

I have a situation where one of the response headers Content-Disposition has to be removed. So I thought of writing a servlet filter to do this. But I realized that the HttpServletResponse has only a setHeader() method but no method to remove it. How can I do this?

Answer

BalusC picture BalusC · Oct 25, 2011

You can't delete headers afterwards by the standard Servlet API. Your best bet is to just prevent the header from being set. You can do this by creating a Filter which replaces the ServletResponse with a custom HttpServletResponseWrapper implementation which skips the setHeader()'s job whenever the header name is Content-Disposition.

Basically:

@Override
public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
    chain.doFilter(request, new HttpServletResponseWrapper((HttpServletResponse) response) {
        public void setHeader(String name, String value) {
            if (!name.equalsIgnoreCase("Content-Disposition")) {
                super.setHeader(name, value);
            }
        }
    });
}

Just map that filter on the URL-pattern of interest to get it to run.