Hi, I am facing the exact same problem that has been described below. Once the first servlet has read and used up the data in the request's ServletInputStream, any other JSP or servlet to which the request is forwarded to will face an inconsistent situtaion: The contentType, method, etc say that some POST data should be expected, but there is no real POST data because the upstream servlet has already read the data. May be the first servlet can communicate to the second servlet via a special request attribute that the inputStream has been read? In a framework environment such as struts, this is a bigger problem because the second servlet (which is comprised of ActionServlet, RequestUtils, DiskMultipartRequestHandler, MultipartIterator classes) has no generalized way of knowing that the request's input stream has been read already and Struts tries to process direct requests from the browser in the same way as forwarded requests. Thanks Azariah Re: How does one forward a POST request when the POST data has al read y been processed? * From: Duane Morse * Subject: Re: How does one forward a POST request when the POST data has al read y been processed? * Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 09:20:33 -0800 That's exactly what's happening, which is the reason for my question. If one wants to separate business processing from presentation, using servlets and EJBs for the former and JSPs for the latter, then how does one dispatch to the JSP when the data the JSP needs is in special request attributes? My JSP is making no calls to retrieve form variables, but apparently Tomcat 3.2b8 is trying to set things up so it could -- since the servlet has already processed the input, that's an error. So is there NO way to divide the labor in this fashion? How do you EVER have servlets (and JSPs) pass work among themselves if the framework is going to do this sort of thing? The first time a servlet opens the input stream and reads the POST data, all subsequent servlets and JSPs are screwed. -----Original Message----- From: Albert Wong [<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>] Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 5:06 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: How does one forward a POST request when the POST data has al read y been processed? Typically information to be displayed by the JSP is communicated via the ServletRequest.setAttribute and the RequestDispatcher. For example, ServletA performs the business logic and stores the results using setAttribute(java.lang.String name, java.lang.Object o), and the servlet or jsp retreives the information using getAttribute(java.lang.String name). If your servlet performing the business logic already called ServletResponse.getOutputStream() or ServletResponse.getWriter() before calling RequestDispatcher.forward then that might explain the behavior your experiencing with Tomcat (it's not allowed by the Servlet Spec). -----Original Message----- From: Duane Morse [<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>] Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 3:27 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: How does one forward a POST request when the POST data has alread y been processed? I ran into a problem with the Tomcat 3.2-b8 release, and it has implications beyond the Tomcat implementation; hence my posting here. I have a servlet which processes a form which uses the POST method, and it forwards the request to another servlet (in this case, a JSP) after adding a data structure to the request object which the target servlet should use to format the response page. This is your classic "let JSP handle the presentation" mode of operations. Since the real response data is in my own data object, the target servlet ignores the original input. Tomcat's problem with this is that it apparently tries to prepare the target for processing POST data, but the data has already been read, so it gets a "short data" error (i.e., CONTENT_LENGTH is n, but the number of data bytes in the stream is 0). I can't see any way of changing the method type or the content length in the request object before forwarding it. How should I invoke a servlet in a manner that doesn't potentially confuse the servlet container? Duane Morse, Eldorado Computing Inc., Phoenix AZ
