Java servlet not writing response bytes

I have a few Java servlets (3.x - Tomcat 8) running that generate and return PDF documents. I've never had any problems with any of them. I recently wrote a new servlet to also create and return a PDF document, and this new servlet is using the exact same piece of response code as the others are using:

response.reset();
response.setContentType("application/pdf");
response.setHeader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "binary");
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition","attachment; filename=\""+filename+".pdf\""); 
response.setContentLength(pdfBytes.length);

System.out.println("# Bytes => " + pdfBytes.length);

ServletOutputStream sos = response.getOutputStream();
BufferedOutputStream bos = new BufferedOutputStream(sos);
bos.write(pdfBytes);
sos.flush();
sos.close();

As I said, this has been working fine with the others, but when I call the new servlet, it returns 0 bytes, even though the print statement above has a non-zero value.

However, if I change the response writing code above to:

OutputStream os = response.getOutputStream();
os.write(pdfBytes);
os.flush();
os.close();

...it works fine, returning a well-formed PDF document. Why might this be happening?

Jon Skeet
people
quotationmark

You're not flushing the BufferedOutputStream - so it's buffering all your data. You should flush that, not the ServletOutputStream.

However, if you're only writing a single byte array, there's no point in using BufferedOutputStream anyway - and you shouldn't need to explicitly flush anyway, as closing will flush. So you just need:

ServletOutputStream sos = response.getOutputStream();
sos.write(pdfBytes);
// Unclear whether *this* is needed, either.
sos.close();

I'd personally expect the servlet container to close the output stream, but it's not clear from the docs. Whether you want to close it if an exception occurs is a different matter...

people

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