REST and gzip

[Jamsta1912]

Hello all.

I am currently working on a third party integration using REST. The third party want to compress the messages to our ServiceNow instance using gzip. Is there a particular methodology I’ll need to use to decompress the message our end, or is this handled automatically?

Thank you.

Jamie 

[Ujjawal Vishnoi · Accepted solution]

You can test it at your end by sending request to your endpoint by postman or rest api explorer with header

Content-Encoding as gzip

Hope this helps.

Regards

Ujjawal

[Jamsta1912]

Ah yes, that does help. I had been testing using hurl.it and I had noticed that by default the messages being generated did have Content-Encoding: gzip. So I think this means it will work fine. Than you again!

Jamie.

[John Caruso]

Hi Jamie,

Apologies for misunderstanding the scenario. In any case, I wanted to point out that HTTP compression is taken care of at the HTTP layer - so whether you use SOAP or REST doesn't really matter. Inbound HTTP requests are ultimately processed via the Apache Tomcat server HTTP stack which routes the incoming HttpServletRequest (GlideServletRequest) through a servlet Filter chain, including a GZip filter. This filter automatically handles outbound compression and inbound decompression of gzip-encoded content.

Also, for your scenario, the incoming request body would be gzip'd. While this can be tested using Postman (w/binary file option and selecting a pre-gzipped file), I am not aware of how this could be tested using REST Explorer, as I see no option for gzipping the request body. In my own testing when setting Content-Encoding: gzip on a PATCH call, I get a 400 error with message "Not in GZIP format". 

I was able to successfully use Postman to send a PATCH with a pre-gzipped request body with the Content-Encoding: gzip header to my Kingston dev instance.

HTH,

John

[Jamsta1912]

Hello John,

Thank you for taking the time to write up this explanation. It's really helpful to get an understanding of the detail - it was previously a bit too mysterious for me! 🙂