Illegal State Exception   

For servlets, the easiest way to avoid this is to branch the code in your service method in such a way as to insure that calls to HttpServletResponse.sendRedirect or RequestDispatcher.forward are always the last call made before the end of the method. This can be achieved by adding a return call just after either of these.

Example:


public void doGet(HttpServletRequest  request, 
                  HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException{

    if("client".equals(request.getParameter("user_type"))){
        response.sendRedirect("client-screen.jsp");
        return;  // <-------  This return statement prevents any further writing to the outputStream
    }
   
    //
    // Other code that may write to the outputStream....
    //

}


Another way this can happen is by attempting to redirect from within the middle of a JSP page, eg:


...
<div>hello world</div>
<%
 if ("not logged in")
        response.sendRedirect("login.jsp");
%>
<div>more stuff</div>
...


Another common place where an IllegalStateException is likely to occur is in a JSP that attempts to stream binary data. JSPs are primarily designed to format output as HTML. With HTML, white space characters are ignored. It is not uncommon for JSP compilers to inject their own white space charaters to the beginning and/or end of the output stream. Line breaks in the developer's code can also be interpreted as white space in the output stream. These white space characters can interfer with the generated servlet's ability to create and stream the binary outputdata, resulting in the IllegalStateException.

The simple solution to this problem is to always us a servlet for streaming binary data.

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