Unexpected character in payload - citrus-framework

Question

My Citrus test sends a (travel)request to some REST API. The response is handled as follows:
http()
.client("http://localhost:18082/cases")
.send()
.post()
.accept("application/json; charset=UTF-8")
.contentType("application/json")
//.payload(new ClassPathResource("templates/travelrequest.json"));
.payload(
"{ "+
"\"definition\": \"travelrequest.xml\", "+
"\"name\": \"travelrequest\" "+
"} "
);
Although response code 500 is received, this is what I expect. In Wireshark I captured the following package:
Host: localhost:18082
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.5.3 (Java/1.8.0_121)
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
{ "definition": "travelrequest.xml", "name": "travelrequest" } HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Server: spray-can/1.3.3
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2017 15:33:37 GMT
When I move the payload to a template, the receive part of my test now looks like this:
http()
.client("http://localhost:18082/cases")
.send()
.post()
.accept("application/json; charset=UTF-8")
.contentType("application/json")
.payload(new ClassPathResource("templates/travelrequest.json"));
//.payload(
// "{ "+
// "\"definition\": \"travelrequest.xml\", "+
// "\"name\": \"travelrequest\" "+
// "} "
//);
The template resource contains this text:
{
"definition": "travelrequest.xml",
"name": "travelrequest"
}
When I run this test, I receive a different response code: 400. In Wireshark I captured the following package:
Host: localhost:18082
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.5.3 (Java/1.8.0_121)
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
?{
"definition": "travelrequest.xml",
"name": "travelrequest"
}HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: spray-can/1.3.3
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2017 15:36:15 GMT
Do notice that the request starts with an unexpected questionmark. This questionmark is not visible in the Citrus output:
17:36:13,629 DEBUG client.HttpClient| Sending HTTP message to: 'http://localhost:18082/cases'
17:36:13,629 DEBUG client.HttpClient| Message to send:
{
"definition": "travelrequest.xml",
"name": "travelrequest"
}
17:36:13,630 DEBUG ingClientInterceptor| Sending Http request message
Do notice the space directly before the opening bracket.
Is this some special character? Why is it added to the payload? Is there a logical explanation?
Cheers,
Ed

Answer 1

Seems to be an encoding issue. Citrus by default uses UTF-8 encoding when reading the file content. Maybe the file uses some other encoding and the first character is the result of this difference.
Please check the file encoding. You can tell Citrus to use some other encoding by setting the System property
citrus.file.encoding=UTF-8
You can also add this property to the citrus-application.properties file as described here: http://www.citrusframework.org/reference/html/configuration.html#citrus-application-properties