[HTTPCLIENT-1756] Response Body on response codes over 300 should not be ignored

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 4.5.2
• Fix Version/s: 5.3-alpha1
• Component/s: HttpClient (classic)
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Michael Peter Gower
• Created: 14/Jul/16 19:10
• Updated: 10/Dec/23 08:51
• Resolved: 26/Apr/23 20:21

Description

Hello. This is my first time posting an issue to this project. I've done my best to be helpful.

Many modern RESTful APIs (e.g. Amazon Web Services) will return a generic status description (e.g. "Bad Request") and details in the body of the response on an error (e.g. code 400).

However the org.apache.http.client.fluent.Response.returnContent() ignores the body (content) on a return code of over or equal to 300, causing the debugging information to be lost. This leads to generic exception messages.

A possible solution would be to include the body in the exception string, as demonstrated in the below ResponseHandler.

    protected static class FaultTolerantContentResponseHandler
            extends ContentResponseHandler {
        @Override
        public Content handleResponse(final HttpResponse response)
                throws HttpResponseException, IOException {
            final StatusLine statusLine = response.getStatusLine();
            final HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
            Content content = entity == null ? null : handleEntity(entity);
            if (statusLine.getStatusCode() >= 300) {
                String message = statusLine.getReasonPhrase();
                if (content != null) {
                    message += ", body was " + content.asString();
                }
                throw new HttpResponseException(statusLine.getStatusCode(),
                        message);
            }
            return content;
        }
    }

Alternatives would be to create a new subclass of HttpResponseException that would have an additional getErrorContent() method to preserve backwards compatibility.

Issue Links

• causes: HTTPCLIENT-2312 Response body from returnContent() truncated to 256 bytes