servlets - How do delete a HTTP response header?

Question

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 1

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.