We are programming a MULE REST service which is divided in several layers.
The API layer (RAML-based) receives the inbound requests and prepares some flowVars so that the lower layers know how to proceed.
The second layer is also service defined, so there's one flow for each service oferred.
Finally, the third layer contains a unique flow and is the one which, depending on the flowVars configured in the upper layer, carries out a call using a HTTP Request component to the third-party service needed.
In this third layer, some audit registers are made in order to know what we are sending and what we are receiving. So, our audit component (a custom MULE connector) needs to write the content of the payload to our database, so a message.getPayloadAsString() (or similar) is needed. If we use a clean getter (like message.getPayload()), only the data type is obtained and thus written into the database.
The problem lays right in here. Every single payload received seems to be a BufferInputStream and, when doing the message.getPayloadAsString(), an inner casting seems to be affecting the payload. This, normally, wouldn't be a problem except for one of the cases that we have found: one of the services we invoke returns a PNG file, so message.getPayloadAsString() turns it into a String and breaks the image.
We've tried to clone the payload in order to keep one of the copies safe from the casting but, as an Object, it's not implementing Cloneable interface; we've tried to make a copy of the payload in any other single way, but only a new reference is generated; we've tried to serialize the payload to create a new copy from the serialized data but the Object doesn't either implement Serializable interface... Everything useless.
Any help, idea or piece of advice would be appreciated.
We finally managed to solve the problem by using message.getPayloadAsBytes();, which return value is a brand new byte[] object. This method doesn't either alter the payload within the message. By using the byte array we can create a String object to be written in our audit like this:
byte[] auditByteArray[] = message.getPayloadAsBytes();
String auditString = new String(auditByteArray);
Moreover, we tried a test consisting in stablishing that byte array as the new payload in the message and both JSON and PNG responses are managed correctly by the browser.