Wrong encoding after URL decoding on Wildfly 10 with JSF and Omnifaces

Question

I have a simple JEE 7 application, running on Wildfly 10.1.0.Final, with an encoding problem after URL decoding.

I am using the org.omnifaces.util.FacesLocal class from Omnifaces 2.6.3 to redirect to another page with additional GET parameters as part of the URL, e.g. /<context-root>/search.xhtml?topic=1&term=Österreich

The redirect is working as expected and the URL seems to be correctly URL encoded. /<context-root>/search.xhtml?topic=1&term=%D6sterreich

The URL encoding happens internally in the org.omnifaces.util.Utils class, by using UTF-8 as encoding.

public static String encodeURL(String string) {
    if (string == null) {
        return null;
    }

    try {
        return URLEncoder.encode(string, UTF_8.name());
    }
    catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException(ERROR_UNSUPPORTED_ENCODING, e);
    }
}

After the redirect I am trying to access the GET parameter from the ExternalContext, but the encoding seems to be broken. For the given example I get ?sterreich as string.

FacesContext facesContext = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
ExternalContext externalContext = facesContext.getExternalContext();

// Delivers the GET-parmeter with broken encoding
String term = externalContext.getRequestParameterMap().get("term");

// Delivers the complete query string with correct encoding
HttpServletRequest servletRequest = (HttpServletRequest) externalContext.getRequest();
String queryString = servletRequest.getQueryString();

I already checked the following encodings.

Platform encoding is: UTF-8

Wildlfy encodings are also set to: UTF-8

<servlet-container name="default" default-encoding="UTF-8">

<http-listener name="default" socket-binding="http" redirect-socket="https" enable-http2="true" url-encoding="UTF-8" />

I also tried adding the Omnifaces CharacterEncodingFilter to web.xml to set the request character encoding to UTF-8.

<filter>
    <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.omnifaces.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

What encoding setting am I missing?

Is it possible that Undertow is falling back to ISO_8859_1?

After some more digging I found out that the problem seems to be the encoding part and not the decoding one.

For testing I set the url-charset to ISO-8859-1 (via standalone.xml) and everything was working as expected.

<http-listener name="default" socket-binding="http" redirect-socket="https" enable-http2="true" decode-url="true" url-charset="ISO-8859-1" />

After this finding I re-checked the code that is responsible for the encoding and found out that the URL is no longer encoded by the Omnifaces Utils method, that I mentioned previously (another developer rewrote the code). Therefore I testet it again by manually encoding the URL with UTF-8 charset and received a new URL that is now correctly UTF-8 encoded.

/<context-root>/search.xhtml?topic=1&term=%C3%96sterreich

To fully understand the issue I have the following open questions:

Who is responsible for automatic URL encoding, if it's not done by me? Is it JSF or Undertow?
Where can I change the encoding, that is used for the encoding?

If there is no solution I will correctly encode the URL by myself but it would be nice if the automatic way (thats already happening somewhere) would also work correctly.

Wrong encoding after URL decoding on Wildfly 10 with JSF and Omnifaces

0 Answers0