Websphere Message Broker HTTP Reply Node default behaviour changed after fix pack installation

I installed a 6.0.0.9 fix pack םn one of my clients site. After the installation I notice that some client applications that work over HTTP began to get strange errors. They couldn't parse the response. I checked the response with tester tool for WS SoapUI and notice that hebrew characters represented in something that looked like unicode encoding and not UTF-8 ( just hebrew characters ).
This was my mistake. will explain it shortly.

This was the behavior when I worked through biphttplistener.
But if working through IE01: WebSphere Message Broker - Proxy Servlet for the HTTP nodes the communication worked great. The response was interpreted in UTF-8, no errors in clients apps.

Problem

The problem is that IBM changed the default behavior of the HTTP Reply node. After the fix pack 4 of WMB 6 by default the Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8 was removed from the reply. Thus when the client got the reply without any specific encoding it tried to read it as Ascii and not UTF-8. The data returned in the same UTF-8 encoding as you can see below the raw data before and after the fix :

Before Fix Pack

POST /SOA/unicodeproblem/workdude HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
SOAPAction: "urn:recache"
User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1
Host: localhost:9999
Content-Length: 248




hello
[0xd7][0xa9][0xd7][0x9c][0xd7][0x95][0xd7][0x9d] [0xd7][0xa9][0xd7][0x9c][0xd7][0x95][0xd7][0x9d]




After the Fix Pack

POST /SOA/unicodeproblem/workdude HTTP/1.1
SOAPAction: "urn:recache"
User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1
Host: localhost:9999
Content-Length: 248



hello
[0xd7][0xa9][0xd7][0x9c][0xd7][0x95][0xd7][0x9d] [0xd7][0xa9][0xd7][0x9c][0xd7][0x95][0xd7][0x9d]




[0xd7][0xa9][0xd7][0x9c][0xd7][0x95][0xd7][0x9d] [0xd7][0xa9][0xd7][0x9c][0xd7][0x95][0xd7][0x9d] is equal to שלום שלום

Solution

You have couple of options:

1. set the content type manually in the code.
2. set default header by the checkbox on Http Reply Node. (Need to redeploy all your flows)
3. Work through IE01 sp, the content header is always set.