A long standing “problem” with Cocoa has been Apple’s insistence that HTTP header field names are case-insensitive. This is clearly described in the documentation and also in the relevant RFC.
However not all server systems follow these standards so strictly and often require HTTP header field names to have a specific case. For example if the server expects the name “MyHeaderField” and your app sends “Myheaderfield” then the server may not read the value sent in the header field at all.
Your code may look something like this:
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.server.com"]]; [request setValue:@"value" forHTTPHeaderField:@"MyHeaderField"];
The problem was that when the HTTP request is sent to the server, the case of the name of the header field was “helpfully” changed for you, without giving you any control over the exact change or any way to override it. In the example above the name would become “Myheaderfield” instead of “MyHeaderField”, which is what you specified in the code.
If you have control over the server API you could just ask the server team to look for “Myheaderfield” instead and all would be well. But if the server API was a third party serving multiple clients, you would have a problem.
With iOS 5 this behavior has changed. Now the header field names are not changed at all. Whatever you specify in your code is what is sent to the server. Nice!
If your code looks like the snippet above, and you made a deal with the server team to look for the modified case string, then you may have issues when your app is running on iOS 5. Of course in the perfect world where servers followed the RFC to the letter, there would not be an issue (in iOS 5 or earlier) because the server would not care about the capitalization and treat “MyHeaderField” and “Myheaderfield” as the same.
http://0xced.blogspot.com/2010/06/fixing-nsmutableurlrequest.html
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/142670-http-extensions-to-nsmutableurlrequest-erroneously-modify-headers.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2543396/how-to-add-lowercase-field-to-nsurlrequest-header-field