How to compress the body of Spring WebClient post request?

Question

I am doing some testing with Spring WebClient. In the following codes, I have set the compress to true. However when I check the debug logs, I can see the "accept-encoding: gzip" header is added, but the body is not compressed. Any way to force compress on post request body? Thanks.

HttpClient httpClient = HttpClient.create().compress(true).wiretap(true);

WebClient webClient = WebClient.builder()
                .baseUrl("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com")
                .defaultHeader(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
                .defaultHeader(HttpHeaders.ACCEPT, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
                .clientConnector(new ReactorClientHttpConnector(httpClient))
                .build();

Post post = new Post();

        post.setUserId(1000L);
        post.setId(2000L);
        post.setTitle("Reactor Netty");

        StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
        IntStream.range(1, 1000).forEach(i -> sb.append("Spring boot webclient"));
        post.setBody(sb.toString());

        Post p = webClient.post().uri("/posts").syncBody(post).retrieve().bodyToMono(Post.class).block();

Lipophilic

Do you want to send the post request body compressed or you want to receive the response compressed? – Sanctum

Both way. The compress() method gives me the impression that this task is taken care of by the library. – Lipophilic

Answer 1

Please refer to this.

.compress(true) is for the server to response as gzip. That's why your post body is not compressed.

I am not familiar with manual http-client and web-client. When I use Spring, I use RestTemplate. This answer details how to force zipping your request body.

Kaffir

Thanks for the answer. One can definitely gzip the body with extra codes. But I was thinking this common task may be available out of box. – Lipophilic

compress(true) is for the server responses. For the request body, Netty does not support it by default: github.com/netty/netty/issues/2132 – Sanctum

@VioletaGeorgieva Thanks Violeta! You answered my question. – Lipophilic