Tomcat Manager App: Deploy fail when using IE, Chrome works

Question

We are having a weird issue with Tomcat Manager apps on a new server. When a war file is uploaded, user path info is included in the app name.
Example: When the OMS-PRIME war is uploaded, the manager app deploys as /C:usersUserNameDesktopOMS-PRIME

This only happens when Internet Explorer is used. This does not happen if the manager app is opened using a Chrome browser. IE is our enterprise standard browser.

• Server: Windows Server 2012R2
• Tomcat: 8.0.35
• Java: 1.8.0_92-b14
• Internet Explorer 11

Any ideas?

Answer 1

By including un-escaped backslashes in the filename value Internet Explorer does not currently comply with RFC6266.

If you're able to use a customized version of Tomcat you could re-introduce the condition in HttpParser.unquote that simply returns the unmodified string if it does not begin with a double-quote:

Index: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tomcat/tc8.5.x/trunk/java/org/apache/tomcat/util/http/parser/HttpParser.java
===================================================================
--- java/org/apache/tomcat/util/http/parser/HttpParser.java (revision 1755813)
+++ java/org/apache/tomcat/util/http/parser/HttpParser.java (working copy)
@@ -62,7 +62,7 @@
     }

     public static String unquote(String input) {
-        if (input == null || input.length() < 2) {
+        if (input == null || input.length() < 2 || input.charAt(0) != '"') {
             return input;
         }

You can also workaround this issue by modifying IE to not send the full path in the filename attribute by doing the following:

1) Internet Options
2) Security Tab
3) Select relevant zone
4) Click Custom level...
5) Under Miscellaneous change the option "Include local directory path when uploading files to a server" to Disable