java.lang.IllegalStateException: getOutputStream() has already been called for this response [duplicate]

Question

When user clicks a certain link ,Using web services transfer document from A Remote ECM system to user machine.

So I have created servlet and from Query string and get parameters from URL .

Depending on parameters attributes several web services related methods were invoked to get file details and file content. now invoke file transfer between servlet and user system.

Biggest concern is that with the below exceptions , code fragment works fine. user can able to save document in desired location. I was trying to figure out why I am getting this error.

Errors:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: getOutputStream() has already been called for this response
at org.apache.catalina.connector.Response.getWriter(Response.java:611)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade.getWriter(ResponseFacade.java:198)
t  DownloadServlet.doGet(DownloadServlet.java:99)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:617)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:723)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:290)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:233)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:191)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:127)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:103)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:109)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:293)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:861)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.process(Http11Protocol.java:606)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint$Worker.run(JIoEndpoint.java:489)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)

Code## DownloadServlet.java

 getDocument(HttpServletRequest request,HttpServletResponse response)
   {
 \\used Custom web services methods to get filename with extensions from external ECM system 
   File resultFile = content.getAsFile();
   response.setContentType("application/octet-stream");  
   ServletOutputStream outStream = response.getOutputStream();          
   try {
       response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=\"" + fileName + "\"");
       byte[] byteBuffer = new byte[BUFSIZE];
       DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream(file));
          while ((in != null) && ((length = in.read(byteBuffer)) != -1)){
            outStream.write(byteBuffer,0,length);
            }
            in.close();
            outStream.flush();                              
      } catch (Exception e) {
          e.printStackTrace();
      }finally{
          outStream.close();
      }

 }

Answer 1

I had same problem while working with a web application using Struts 2 frame work. I searched for a while, and the solution that I found worked for me. I found somewhere that:

Basic rule of HTTP: one request, one response. You can only send back one thing to a request. Either an HTML page, or a PDF document, or an image etc. Java complains if you have already obtained a writer/outputstream as you should only be getting ONE of these.

In my case, the action class which downloads the file was returning back a String "sucess" to the request after the file download, and that caused the problem. I changed the return type of the method to void and issue resolved.