HP e-Commerce / XML director server appliance sa8250 - Users Guide

C H A P T E R 2 HP e-Commerce/XML Director Server Appliance SA8250 User Guide

Content Transfer Encoding Support

NOTE: The Content-

Transfer-Encoding

header is not an HTTP

header, and can only be

specified in a MIME

header (in the header of

an embedded body part).

Message bodies can be encoded so that they do not cause any problem

for some of the protocol transfer gateways, especially when sending

binary data. Even though HTTP is able to handle binary data, many

applications still encode certain types of the messages. This is

especially true if the encoding is being done at an application layer

that is unaware of the transport protocol being used.

There are basically two common transfer encoding schemes: quoted-

printable, and base64. Quoted-printable encodes non-printable

ASCII and non-ASCII characters into the corresponding hexadecimal

representation, while base64 uses a 64-character set to encode the

data.

Both the quoted-printable and base64 values in the “Content-transfer-

encoding” header are recognized. The encoded document is decoded

according the encoding scheme, before any XML document test and

pattern matching are made. The original message is not modified

with respect to content-transfer-encoding.

Signed-Only S/MIME Support

S/MIME messages can be either encrypted or signed-only messages.

For encrypted messages, the format can be either

multipart/

encrypted

, or application/pkcs7-mime with enveloped-data

or encrypted-data. Encrypted messages are not supported, and are

treated as non-XML.

For signed-only messages, 2 formats can be used:

multipart/

signed

or application/pkcs7-mime with signed-data. The

multipart/signed format is supported, because the signed data

content looks like a normal Multipart MIME body part. The

application/pkcs7-mime format is not supported, and messages

in this format are treated as non-XML.