Showing posts with label web resource. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web resource. Show all posts

Thursday, 15 December 2011

Accessing the Web Context


The context in which Web components execute is an object that implements the ServletContext interface. You retrieve the Web context with the getServletContext method. The Web context provides methods for accessing:
  • Initialization parameters
  • Resources associated with the Web context
  • Object-valued attributes
  • Logging capabilities
The Web context is used by the Duke's Bookstore filters filters.HitCounterFilter and OrderFilter, discussed in the section Filtering Requests and Responses. The filters store a counter as a context attribute. Recall from Controlling Concurrent Access to Shared Resources that the counter's access methods are synchronized to prevent incompatible operations by servlets that are running concurrently. A filter retrieves the counter object with the context's getAttribute method. The incremented value of the counter is recorded with the context's log method.
public final class HitCounterFilter implements Filter {
   private FilterConfig filterConfig = null;
   public void doFilter(ServletRequest request,
      ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) 
      throws IOException, ServletException {
      ...
      StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
      PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(sw);
      ServletContext context = filterConfig.
         getServletContext();
      Counter counter = (Counter)context.
         getAttribute("hitCounter");
      ...
      writer.println("The number of hits is: " +
         counter.incCounter());
      ...
      context.log(sw.getBuffer().toString());
      ...
   }
}

Invoking Other Web Resources


Web components can invoke other Web resources in two ways: indirect and direct. A Web component indirectly invokes another Web resource when it embeds in content returned to a client a URL that points to another Web component. In the Duke's Bookstore application, most Web components contain embedded URLs that point to other Web components. For example,ShowCartServlet indirectly invokes the CatalogServlet through the embedded URL /bookstore1/catalog.
A Web component can also directly invoke another resource while it is executing. There are two possibilities: it can include the content of another resource, or it can forward a request to another resource.
To invoke a resource available on the server that is running a Web component, you must first obtain a RequestDispatcher object using the getRequestDispatcher("URL") method.
You can get a RequestDispatcher object from either a request or the Web context; however, the two methods have slightly different behavior. The method takes the path to the requested resource as an argument. A request can take a relative path (that is, one that does not begin with a /), but the Web context requires an absolute path. If the resource is not available, or if the server has not implemented a RequestDispatcher object for that type of resource, getRequestDispatcher will return null. Your servlet should be prepared to deal with this condition.
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