Input Headers/Output Headers

The Input Headers and Output Headers tabs describe the data structure for the headers of the HTTP request and the HTTP reply message. You can use the default structure, or you can alter the structure, if the outgoing request or the reply to the request has a specific data structure for the header. This tab uses the same mechanism described Specifying Data Schema to specify the data structure for the headers. For more information about creating a customized data structure, see that section.

Header structure is defined by the HTTP protocol. For more information about the fields and content of the header of a HTTP request, see the HTTP Protocol specification. You can obtain this specification at www.w3.org.

The default header fields are the following.

Header

Datatype

Description

Accept (input header)

string

This field specifies media types that are acceptable for response messages for the request. For example, text/*,text/html. Media types are described in the HTTP specification.

If no Accept header field is specified, then the server assumes that all media types are acceptable.

Accept-Charset (input header)

string

This field specifies the character sets that are acceptable for response messages for the request. For example, iso-8859-5, unicode-1-1. Character sets are described in the HTTP specification.

If no Accept-Charset header is specified, then the server assumes that any character set is acceptable.

Accept-Encoding (input header)

string

This field specifies the content-coding values that are acceptable for response messages. For example, compress, gzip. For more information about this header field, see the HTTP specification.

Content-Type (input/output header)

string

This field indicates the media type of the entity body for the outgoing message and the incoming response. Media types are described in the HTTP specification. An example of the media type is text/html; charset=ISO-8850-4.

Content-Length (output header)

string

This field indicates the size of the entity body (in decimal number of OCTETs) of the response message.

Content-Encoding (output header)

string

This field is used as a modifier to the content-type. When present, its value indicates what additional content encodings have been applied to the entity-body, and thus what decoding mechanisms must be applied in order to obtain the media-type referenced by the Content-Type header field. Content-Encoding is primarily used to allow a document to be compressed without losing the identity of its underlying media type. For more information about this field, see the HTTP specification.

Date (output header)

string

The date and time when the response message was sent.

Server (output header)

string

The server sending the original response message.

Location (output header)

string

This field is used to redirect the receiver to a location other than the Request-URI for completion of the request or for identification of a new resource.

Connection

string

This field allows the requestor to specify options desired for this connection. For example, the option close specifies that the requestor would like the connection to be closed when the request is complete.

Set-Cookie (output header)

string

For more information about this field, see the HTTP specification.

If you want to receive more than one cookie, set the Cardinality for this field to Repeating (*).

Cookie (input header)

string

A name/value pair (also known as a cookie) containing information that the HTTP server may be expecting.

You can set the Cardinality field for this element to Repeating (*) to specify more than one cookie. You can also specify multiple name/value pairs in a single non-repeating element by separating each pair with a comma (for example, "name1=value1, name2=value2").

If you set the custom engine property bw.plugin.http.protocol.single-cookie-header to true, multiple name/value pairs are sent as a single header element. For more information about custom engine properties, see TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™ Administration.

Pragma (input/output header)

string

This field is used to include implementation-specific directives that might apply to the receiver. For more information about using this field, see the HTTP specification.