HTTP redirect response loads the redirected URL as part of original URL

Question

I have a Spring Boot Reactive Web service application with a REST service that processes the request and redirects the response to another page like this:

@RequestMapping(value = {"/redirect/", "/{context}/redirect/"}){
   public class RedirectController{

       @GetMapping(value = "/{param}/**")
public Mono<ResponseEntity<Void>> doGet(ServerHttpRequest request, Locale locale, @PathVariable("param") String param) {
      return applicationLogic(param) //application logic here...
            .map(this::buildRedirectResponseEntity)
            .contextWrite(context -> Context.of(requestContext));
   }

   private ResponseEntity<Void> buildRedirectResponse(String redirectUrl) {
      return ResponseEntity
            .status(HttpStatus.MOVED_PERMANENTLY)
            .location(URI.create(redirectUrl))
            .build();
    }
 }

When I run this Spring Boot application in my local Mac on

http://localhost:8080/redirect/test-param

and test this code in Chrome browser, the response header in Chrome is shown as expected.

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https%3A%2F%2Fwww.test-url.com

However, the browser and the Postman Rest client loads the URL like this "http://localhost:8080/redirect/https%3A%2F%2www.test-url.com"

Why is this redirect not loading the redirect URL and attaching it as part of the original URL?

Answer 1

The issue here is that the redirect URL was encoded.

If the URL is not encoded, the redirect works.

Here is the HTTP response with the right URL format:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://www.test-url.com

So the fix is to ensure that the redirect URL domain is not encoded.