Response Header Lines for Static Files

This section describes HTTP response header lines generated by IIS server for static files based their file name extensions.

Static files can be served directly by IIS server, if you copy files to \inetpub\wwwroot, IIS will set "Content-Type" header line based on the file name extension and the MIME settings of the server configuration. Let's look at 3 commonly used file name extensions.

1. Command: "java HttpRequestGet /hello.html 80" gives us:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2002 19:27:28 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Sat, 28 Dec 2002 15:05:54 GMT
ETag: "0f597e0a8e8c21:903"
Content-Length: 38

<html><body>Hello world!</body></html>

Couple of interesting notes here:

2. Command: "java HttpRequestGet /dot.gif 80" gives us:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2002 03:14:22 GMT
Content-Type: image/gif
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 21:48:20 GMT
ETag: "0aafb4ddc43c21:903"
Content-Length: 43

GIF89a......

As you can see, Content-Type was set correctly to "image/gif" for file name extension "gif", as defined in the MIME settings. I could not included the entity body here because it contains binary data.

3. Command: "java HttpRequestGet /hello.pdf 80" gives us:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2002 03:29:21 GMT
Content-Type: application/pdf
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Sat, 28 Dec 2002 21:22:12 GMT
ETag: "01ab9248554c31:903"
Content-Length: 909

%PDF-1.3
% ...
4 0 obj
......

Again, Content-Type was set correctly to "application/pdf" for file name extension "pdf", as defined in the MIME settings. I truncated the entity body to save some space.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 ASP (Active Server Pages) Introduction

 IIS (Internet Information Services) 5.0

 MS Script Debugger

 VBScript Language

 ASP Built-in Run-time Objects

 ASP Session

 Creating and Managing Cookies

 Managing Sessions with and without Cookies

 scrrun.dll - Scripting Runtime DLL

Managing Response Header Lines

 HTTP Response Syntax

 HTTP Response Header Lines

 Controlling Response Header Lines

 Viewing Response Header Lines

Response Header Lines for Static Files

 Controlling Response Header Line Example

 Sending Binary Files to Browsers

 Sending Files as Downloads

 Calculation Speed and Response Time

 ADO (ActiveX Data Object) DLL

 Working with MS Access Database

 Guest Book Application Example

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB