Accessing 'system' header fields implicitly added by HttpClient

Moataz Abdelnasser moataz.nasser20 at gmail.com
Thu May 20 14:58:01 UTC 2021


Hi!

I've recently released an HTTP cache
(https://mizosoft.github.io/methanol/caching) that operates as part of
an interceptor chain built atop a standard HttpClient.
Currently, the cache can store only one response per request. However,
request headers can specify multiple response variants if nominated by
the 'Vary' header
(e.g. gzip & deflate variants if varying on Accept-Encoding). To
ensure a response is selected only if it is the corrected variant,
incoming requests' Vary-nominated fields
must match against those in the initiating request.

The bummer is that HttpClient can augment requests with implicit
header fields (e.g. Cookie, Authorization, etc.), and accessing these
seems to be impossible (tested that
with 'response.request().headers()', please correct me if I'm wrong).
The cache has to render a response uncacheable if it decides it varies
on these fields, as their values cannot be
known in the initiating request, so they can't be matched against when
new requests are made. It'd be nice if one could access these headers,
maybe via 'response.request().headers()',
or something like 'response.networkRequest().headers()'. This would
increase cache's efficiency. Additionally, I can find it useful for
debugging as it's always good to know what
modifications the client makes to requests.

Regards,
Moataz


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