[Geoserver-devel] WMS Response Content-Type set incorrectly (or not at all?)

Hi All,

I have been hitting a nightly build 1.5.x 900913 supported geoserver. What I am finding is quite odd, the WMS response content-type of images is according to Firefox and tilecache is “text/html”.

This has been occuring with gif’s, png8 and sometimes png (the sometimes part is a worry).

To expand on a few things:

IE 6 and below do not support 24bit png (forget that CPU intensive .js patch please). I could use image/png8 but wouldn’t that mean that the response content-type is “image/png8” which the browser will say… “what tha heck is that?”.
Additionally, I also did some testing of image/png8 in IE7, and found that it confused the heck out of the browser. I had black odd shaped OpenLayers tiles… and also my FireFox displayed the image in its own window as garbled plain text.

If you think about this, you can’t use 24bit with IE6 and you can’t use 8bit (image/png8) with IE7.

Additionally, I then switched to GIF’s… I also ran TileCache in front of this, and because the Response Type is set to “text/html” TileCache rightfully says… “Hang on, I asked for an image… I got text/html so this must be an error” and it refuses to put this data into its cache. This is the default error response mechanism for most WMS implementations. More specifically, if the content-type is not correctly set then it is very difficult for a client to detect error and success.

I have seen Content-Type and Status-Code’s from WMS responses being neglected by other popular opensource, and commercial wms’s and it’s a continual source of frustration.

Anyway, it’s a very important piece of functionality and at worst I’ll checkout the the 1.5.x branch/trunk and see if there is anything I can do… but help/comments/eta would be most appreciated.

Cheers,
–AH

Hi Andrew,

I have just checked the GeoServer 1.5.x and 1.6.x HEAD code and noticed nothing strange. The content-type should be always the right one. I also tried them with IE6/IE7/FFox and have found no problem actually.

Is there a use case I can follow to reproduce your problem? Which version of GeoServer are you using actually? Have you tried the latest ones?

On 9/4/07, Andrew Hughes <ahhughes@anonymised.com> wrote:

Hi All,

I have been hitting a nightly build 1.5.x 900913 supported geoserver. What I am finding is quite odd, the WMS response content-type of images is according to Firefox and tilecache is “text/html”.

This has been occuring with gif’s, png8 and sometimes png (the sometimes part is a worry).

To expand on a few things:

IE 6 and below do not support 24bit png (forget that CPU intensive .js patch please). I could use image/png8 but wouldn’t that mean that the response content-type is “image/png8” which the browser will say… “what tha heck is that?”.
Additionally, I also did some testing of image/png8 in IE7, and found that it confused the heck out of the browser. I had black odd shaped OpenLayers tiles… and also my FireFox displayed the image in its own window as garbled plain text.

If you think about this, you can’t use 24bit with IE6 and you can’t use 8bit (image/png8) with IE7.

Additionally, I then switched to GIF’s… I also ran TileCache in front of this, and because the Response Type is set to “text/html” TileCache rightfully says… “Hang on, I asked for an image… I got text/html so this must be an error” and it refuses to put this data into its cache. This is the default error response mechanism for most WMS implementations. More specifically, if the content-type is not correctly set then it is very difficult for a client to detect error and success.

I have seen Content-Type and Status-Code’s from WMS responses being neglected by other popular opensource, and commercial wms’s and it’s a continual source of frustration.

Anyway, it’s a very important piece of functionality and at worst I’ll checkout the the 1.5.x branch/trunk and see if there is anything I can do… but help/comments/eta would be most appreciated.

Cheers,
–AH


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