[SOLR-17355] Deprecate (or remove) special 'wt=json' support from filestore "get file" API

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: Package Manager, v2 API
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jason Gerlowski
• Created: 28/Jun/24 15:09
• Updated: 25/Sep/24 19:28

Description

Our filestore has a "get file" API, which returns the contents of a filestore entry.

In almost all cases, this API returns verbatim whatever bytes are associated with the entry in the filestore.  But there's an exception: if "wt=json" is specified, the API will take the bytes stored in the filestore, attempt to string-ify them, and then package those into a JSON response (complete with 'responseHeader', etc.).

 

This hidden functionality is undocumented, error-prone (it doesn't support binary content, for instance), makes the response hard to clients to parse, and complicates code on the server side as well.

We should consider deprecating/removing it if there's no compelling purpose I'm missing.  Or alternatively: document, test, and harden the functionality (e.g. base64 encode binary content).