CharacterEncodingFilter not set with spring-boot 1.2.0 and spring-boot-legacy

Question

I am running a traditional spring boot war in tomcat (servlet 2.5). The requests do not have any encoding set, though the CharacterEncodingFilter is configured by default with spring-boot 1.2.0. I can see it configured in the autoconfig and logs. Perhaps this is not being configured by spring-boot-legacy (1.0.1)? I added the filter to the web.xml and my requests now have the utf-8 encoding. However, this is not applied to the request parameter. I presume this is because it is not the first filter to access the request (though it is the first filter in my web.xml, which is based on the spring-boot-legacy sample). In the stack trace for my failing request, I do see OncePerRequestFilter as the first filter. Is there any way to get around this?

org.springframework.boot.actuate.autoconfigure.MetricFilterAutoConfiguration$MetricsFilter.doFilterInternal(MetricFilterAutoConfiguration.java:90) [spring-boot-actuator-1.2.0.RELEASE.jar:1.2.0.RELEASE]
at org.springframework.web.filter.OncePerRequestFilter.doFilter(OncePerRequestFilter.java:107) [spring-web-4.1.3.RELEASE.jar:4.1.3.RELEASE]
at org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy.invokeDelegate(DelegatingFilterProxy.java:344) [spring-web-4.1.3.RELEASE.jar:4.1.3.RELEASE]
at org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy.doFilter(DelegatingFilterProxy.java:261) [spring-web-4.1.3.RELEASE.jar:4.1.3.RELEASE]
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:241) [catalina.jar:7.0.53]
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:208) [catalina.jar:7.0.53]
at org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter.doFilterInternal(CharacterEncodingFilter.java:88) [spring-web-4.1.3.RELEASE.jar:4.1.3.RELEASE]
at org.springframework.web.filter.OncePerRequestFilter.doFilter(OncePerRequestFilter.java:107) [spring-web-4.1.3.RELEASE.jar:4.1.3.RELEASE]
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:241) [catalina.jar:7.0.53]

web.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd">

    <context-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>com.myproject.Application</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <listener>
        <listener-class>org.springframework.boot.legacy.context.web.SpringBootContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
    </listener>

    <filter>
      <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
      <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
      <init-param>
        <param-name>encoding</param-name>
        <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
      </init-param>
      <init-param>
        <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
        <param-value>true</param-value>
      </init-param>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
      <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
      <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>

    <filter>
        <filter-name>metricFilter</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>metricFilter</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>contextAttribute</param-name>
            <param-value>org.springframework.web.context.WebApplicationContext.ROOT</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

Thanks, Hari.

Any reason you didn't use a DelegatingFilterProxy for the character encoding (teh bean name is "characterEncodingFilter")? — Dave Syer
@DaveSyer: I made that change though the parameter decoding still doesn't happen. In the meanwhile, I don't think I have understood the scope of spring-boot-legacy. I thought that all the Spring Boot filters are also configured by spring-boot-legacy. It appears that I have to add any required filters to web.xml. — Hari Iyer
Of course you have to add filters to web.xml (that's what Servlet 2.5 is). But to the original question: I don't think CharacterEncodingFilter encodes request parameters anyway (it's only setting headers). — Dave Syer

Dave Syer Dave Syer · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-27T07:19:50

2 suggestions:

Use a DelegatingFilterProxy for the character encoding (the bean name is "characterEncodingFilter").
You have to set the URI encoding in the container as well to get request parameters decoded (e.g. in an embedded container like this, but for a non-embedded container it's up to you to find the setting).

CharacterEncodingFilter not set with spring-boot 1.2.0 and spring-boot-legacy

1 Answers