One more hack for TUS for 0 Content

Image of A Zero (Source)

I've been playing around with the TUS Protocol lately as I've mentioned in previous posts.  I implemented both a TUS Server and a TUS Client using open-source libraries.  I've also been testing with an external system that uses TUSD underneath.

One of the challenges I ran into with the client implementation had to do with not having a Content-Length field on requests such as GET, OPTIONS or HEAD with no body, that shouldn't actually require the Content-Length field.

What I wound up doing in this case was to:

1. Set Content-Length explicitly to 0 in the HttpURLConnection class:
   con.setAttribute("Content-Length", 0);
   
2. And when that didn't work, made sure that I actually retrieved the output stream from the connection even though nothing was written to it:
   if (con.getDoOutput()) {
     con.getOutputStream();
   }
   This is what seems to have the impact on the Content-Length value sent by the underlying HttpsURLConnectionImpl class, although I can't really see what it is doing because as I said previously, good luck finding the source for that.  It's in one of the sun packages that doesn't ship with the Java JRE source code.  I suppose I could decompile those classes, but for the most part, it's not worth the effort.

NOTE: Both of these activities are done in my overridden: prepareConnection() method in a subclassed TusClient class.

Once again, I'm using URLConnection because that's what's in use by the TUS Java Client, not because it's my first choice.  If I had a choice, I'd probably be using the Apache HTTP Client.

TUS is an interesting protocol because it allows for resumable uploads.  I think it could be better if it were able to handle uploads of multiple chunks over separate network connections, so that you could take better advantage of the resumability AND available network bandwidth and CPU.  The protocol would have to be adjusted to deal with that.

     Keith

P.S.  The folks behind TUS would prefer if we wrote it tus, but somehow my fingers keep capitalizing it.  Since it is a TLA, I'll probably keep writing it in all caps.