Issue description

With Token authentication configured for JasperReports Server you may sometimes run into an error like this when trying to authenticate:

19-Jan-2017 16:49:36.418 INFO [http-nio-8443-exec-12] org.apache.coyote.http11.AbstractHttp11Processor.process Error parsing HTTP request header 

Note: further occurrences of HTTP header parsing errors will be logged at DEBUG level. 

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid character found in the request target. The valid characters are defined in RFC 7230 and RFC 3986 

at org.apache.coyote.http11.AbstractNioInputBuffer.parseRequestLine(AbstractNioInputBuffer.java:283) 

at org.apache.coyote.http11.AbstractHttp11Processor.process(AbstractHttp11Processor.java:1013) 

at org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol$AbstractConnectionHandler.process(AbstractProtocol.java:670) 

at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.NioEndpoint$SocketProcessor.doRun(NioEndpoint.java:1520) 

at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.NioEndpoint$SocketProcessor.run(NioEndpoint.java:1476) 

at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1142) 

at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:617) 

at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.TaskThread$WrappingRunnable.run(TaskThread.java:61) 

at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

Explanation and solution

There can be different reasons why the token cannot be parced, but often times it's just incorrect URL format. For example, Tomcat 8.0.39 and some other versions cannot handle requests with certain symbols in request parameters, for example the pipe symbol '|'. This issue is discussed in more details in the following thread on stackoverflow.com:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41053653/tomcat-8-is-not-able-to-handle-get-request-with-in-query-parameters

To get rid of the error you can change the default separator to a different symbol (for example '+') in the applicationContext-externalAuth-preAuth-mt.xml file in the following section: