Hi All,

AFAIK the "X-Request-Id" header is not well-defined. I could not find any
docs about it in RFCs or W3C publications, but Wikipedia [1] lists it as
"non-standard" both in requests and responses and  "superseded" by
"traceparent" in requests.

My preference is option (2): no "X-Request-Id" header in responses.

I'm also ok with options (1), but I believe it would be valuable to cover
that functionality with a feature flag, which is "off" by default. This is
to avoid making the impression that the "X-Request-Id" header is promoted
by Polaris as the main method for request correlation. From the overall
project's perspective, I believe we should align with and support OTel
standards for observability / request correlation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields

Cheers,
Dmitri.

On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 8:17 AM Alexandre Dutra <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This thread follows up on [1] to discuss whether we should echo the
> client-generated X-Request-Id header in the response.
>
> Before Quarkus, the situation was unclear: Polaris on Dropwizard [2]
> did not seem to echo the header, but Dropwizard itself has a
> RequestIdFilter that does [3].
>
> We have two options:
>
> 1) Echo the X-Request-Id header.
>     - Pros: Allows clients to correlate requests and responses.
>     - Cons: risk of over-engineering since we don't have users asking for
> this.
>
> 2) Do not echo the X-Request-Id header.
>     - Pros: No action required on the Polaris side.
>     - Cons: None apparent.
>
> I don't have a strong opinion, but I slightly favor option 1 to
> accommodate those who strongly value this feature.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
> Alex
>
> [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/bb1qyxjt827t3tomv2xp0s1kovxjsp94
> [2]
> https://github.com/apache/polaris/blob/4b18ec065ff16f74b11bc85fdc6ea9036eca7274/dropwizard/service/src/main/java/org/apache/polaris/service/dropwizard/PolarisApplication.java#L516
> [3]
> https://github.com/dropwizard/dropwizard/blob/3833f0e1d9fb8cae256fe09379733b8d651f8b87/dropwizard-jersey/src/main/java/io/dropwizard/jersey/filter/RequestIdFilter.java#L42-L49
>

Reply via email to