Setting content encoding in Velocity

[Eddy Dean]

For performance reasons I recently decided to switch from using JSP views to Velocity. This has worked great so far, and the response time decreased significantly. There is however one problem, I can't set the content encoding that is returned to the browser in the response headers. This worked just fine in JSP by defining the content type with

<%@page contentType="text/html" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

When using Velocity the content type is always set to text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1. Characters that are not in this set are displayed as question marks. I have tried setting output.encoding, default.contentType in velocity.properties and setting an CharacterEncodingFilter in web.xml. A VelocityViewResolver has a content type property, but I want to use the ResourceBundleViewResolver.

I have searched using Google and this forum and there appear to be a lot of people with this problem, but I was unable to find an answer to my problem anywhere. Below are the relevant source files of a small sample application I am using to find a solution to this problem.

web.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd">
    <filter>
        <filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>encoding</param-name>
            <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
            <param-value>true</param-value>
        </init-param>
    </filter>

    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>encodingFilter</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>
    <context-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml</param-value>
    </context-param>
    <listener>
        <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
    </listener>
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.htm</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
    <session-config>
        <session-timeout>
            30
        </session-timeout>
    </session-config>
    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>redirect.jsp</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

dispatcher-servlet.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
       xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"
       xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-2.5.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-2.5.xsd">
    
    <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.support.ControllerClassNameHandlerMapping"/>
    
    <bean id="velocityConfigurer" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.velocity.VelocityConfigurer">
        <property name="resourceLoaderPath" value="WEB-INF/views/"/>
        <property name="configLocation" value="WEB-INF/classes/velocity.properties"/>
    </bean>

    <bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.ResourceBundleViewResolver">
        <property name="basename" value="views"/>
    </bean>

    <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleUrlHandlerMapping">
        <property name="mappings">
            <value>
                /**/home.htm=HomeController
            </value>
        </property>
    </bean>

    <bean id="HomeController" class="test.HomeController">
        
    </bean>
    
</beans>

views.properties:

home.class=org.springframework.web.servlet.view.velocity.VelocityView
home.url=home.vm
home.encoding=UTF-8

velocity.properties:

output.encoding=UTF-8
input.encoding=UTF-8
default.contentType=UTF-8

home.vm:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
        <title>
        Home    </title>
    </head>
    <body>
        Chinese characters: 网生活服
    </body>
</html>

HomeController.java

package test;

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.AbstractController;

public class HomeController extends AbstractController {

    @Override
    protected ModelAndView handleRequestInternal(HttpServletRequest arg0, HttpServletResponse arg1) throws Exception {
        return new ModelAndView("home");
    }

}

Thanks a lot for helping.

[m_auro1]

Try to add in your dispatcher-servlet.xml, at viewResolver bean definition a contentType definition like this:

...
    <property name="contentType" value="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
...

[Eddy Dean]

I know the VelocityViewResolver has a contentType property, but the ResourceBundleViewResolver does not.

org.springframework.beans.InvalidPropertyException: Invalid property 'contentType' of bean class [org.springframework.web.servlet.view.ResourceBundleViewResolver]: No property 'contentType' found

I'm considering to use the VelocityViewResolver anyway, but I still prefer the ResourceBundleViewResolver because it's easier to manage in larger applications.

Thanks anyway.


-----EDIT-----

I'm such an idiot.

views.properties:

simple.class=org.springframework.web.servlet.view.velocity.VelocityView
simple.url=simple.vm
simple.contentType=text/html; charset=utf-8

does the trick.

[m_auro1]

Good, this is a trick not to forget.