#454 NPE in NTLM authentication

[Marcel Schoen]

Our web-based authentication service also supports NTLM authentication. One of the tests starts the service, then sends a simple GET request and expects a 401 response with a "WWW-Authenticate: NTLM". Then our tests performs some checks and sends more requests for continuing. That all worked fine with 1.6.x, but fails with 1.7, because now there is some built-in authentication functionality in the client which cannot deal with that response. The result is a NullPointerException:

java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.util.Hashtable.get(Hashtable.java:363)
at com.meterware.httpunit.WebClient.getCredentialsForRealm(WebClient.java:265)
at com.meterware.httpunit.AuthenticationChallenge.getCredentialsForRealm(AuthenticationChallenge.java:86)
at com.meterware.httpunit.AuthenticationChallenge.needToAuthenticate(AuthenticationChallenge.java:55)
at com.meterware.httpunit.WebClient.createResponse(WebClient.java:649)

I wish it was possible to simply disable any authentication handling attempts in the client, like disabling automatic following of redirects etc.