I have a project that needs to use Angular2 (final) to post to an old, legacy Tomcat 7 server providing a somewhat REST-ish API using .jsp pages.

This worked fine when the project was just a simple JQuery app performing AJAX requests. However, the scope of the project has grown such that it will need to be rewritten using a more modern framework. Angular2 looks fantastic for the job, with one exception: It refuses to perform POST requests using anything option but as form-data, which the API doesn't extract. The API expects everything to be urlencoded, relying on Java's request.getParameter("param") syntax to extract individual fields.

This is a snipped from my user.service.ts:

import { Injectable }    from '@angular/core';

import { Headers, Response, Http, RequestOptions } from '@angular/http';

import { Observable } from 'rxjs/Observable';

import 'rxjs/add/operator/map';



@Injectable()

export class UserService {

    private loggedIn = false;

    private loginUrl = 'http://localhost:8080/mpadmin/api/login.jsp';

    private headers = new Headers({'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'});



    constructor(private http: Http) {}



    login(username, password) {

        return this.http.post(this.loginUrl, {'username': username, 'password':  password}, this.headers)

            .map((response: Response) => {

                let user = response.json();

                if (user) {

                    localStorage.setItem('currentUser', JSON.stringify(user));

                }

            }

        );

    }

}

No matter what I set the header content type to be, it always ends up arriving as non-encoded form-data. It's not honoring the header I'm setting.

Has anyone else encountered this? How do you go about forcing Angular2 to POST data in a format that can be read by an old Java API using request.getParameter("param")?