Bookshelf v7.5: About Transport Headers and HTTP Response Headers

Transports and Interfaces: Siebel eBusiness Application Integration Volume III > EAI HTTP Transport >

About Transport Headers and HTTP Response Headers

This section describes how transport headers and HTTP response headers work with HTTP Transport (outbound) to form a cookie handling system. HTTP Transport handles the cookie it receives from the server by storing and then creating a valid request transport header that it sends back to the server as a part of the request.

By exposing all the HTTP response headers as a part of output property set, you will be able to handle the response accordingly. You can have all the HTTP response headers, as well as HTTP Status code, as part of the output property set.

Transport headers are preserved across various connections and are a part of the transport service and not the HTTP connection.

Transport headers have the following features:

Every connection has its own transport header.

The transport header will separately store each cookie sent by the server during a connection.

For example, each name, domain, value pair, along with path, and other attributes (if present) are stored as a separate cookie in the transport header.

Each cookie in the transport header has a distinct name.

Two cookies with the same name cannot be present in the transport header at the same time. The second cookie will overwrite the first one. Therefore, since the transport header is implemented as a CSSMapStringToPtr class, each cookie is hashed in the transport header based on its name.

The transport header classifies cookies into two categories:

Type HTTP Version 1 and above.

Preliminary Netscape cookie spec type.

When a ToString function is called on the transport header, it scans through the header and collects all the cookies in the header and creates a request transport header (based on the cookie category).

The transport header is cleared when the connection is terminated.

During SendReceive, the HTTP response has HTTP headers associated with it. Expose those response HTTP headers as properties of the output property set.

All these HTTP header properties are distinguished from other properties by appending a prefix HDR. in front of the property (header) name.

Also, HTTP Status code for the HTTP request sent by way of EAI HTTP Transport is exposed as a property in the output property set. The property is called StatusCode.