DELETE request without body uses transfer-encoding: chunked

[AndreasKasparek]

With #3481 (in v 1.1.24 and 1.2.0) the handling of DELETE requests in HttpClientHandler was changed. As mentioned by @bachah in #3481 (comment), the handler now always sets the HTTP request header transfer-encoding: chunked even if there is no payload (empty body). In previous versions that was not the case.

We are using SpringCloudGateway to route requests to a Payara web server. When upgrading the SpringBoot version of our gateway from 3.3.5 to 3.3.6, this pulled in reactor-netty-http v1.2.0 which added the changed behavior. Payara seems to treat incoming requests with transfer-encoding: chunked as having a body, and it forbids DELETE requests from sending a payload and therefore responds with status 400 Bad Request.

The Netty change broke our setup. We had to change the configuration of our Payara server as described here to allow potential payloads for DELETE requests (even so in our use cases we never send a body).

We are fine now, but I guess this change may also affect others. Can the transfer-encoding header be omitted by default if a DELETE request does not contain a body?

[violetagg]

@AndreasKasparek Thanks for the report. The fix will be available with the next release.