[Zope-dev] HTTP Response headers in ZPublisher.HTTPResponse

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 12:37:27 +0100

Yo,

the response headers set in ZPublisher.HTTPResponse our not always RFC 
compliant. In case of exceptions you get: (round lines 670 in 
HTTPResponse.py)

if ev.find( '<html>') >= 0:
                 ev = 'bobo exception'
self.setHeader('bobo-exception-value', ev[:255])

If the content is a xml,wml,whtml,... page, this results in exception 
headers like:

Bobo-Exception-Value: <?xml version="1.0"?>  <!DOCTYPE ...

while most browsers will not barf on this, we encountered numerous 
problems with wap-gateways refusing to swallow this.

Another question is whether it is wise to send things like
the file and line numbers where the exception took place to the client.
I can understand that it can be useful in debug mode, but I can't see a 
reason to do this in a production setup.

The simplest way of fixing this is to change the code to something like:

ev = 'bobo exception'
self.setHeader('bobo-exception-value', ev)

or to leave out these headers altogether.

Romain.