Re: Not understanding something

[Christopher Schultz]

John,

johne wrote:

I had recently upgraded to Tomcat 6 and am using the following on each of my
filter mappings (I have several chained filters).  It is the first time I
had chosen to use this, so maybe I am doing something wrong.

    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>User Agent Filter</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
        <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
        <dispatcher>FORWARD</dispatcher>
    </filter-mapping>

This configures the filter to run on every request that is either the original request (REQUEST) or a forwarded request (FORWARD) from RequestDispatcher.forward(). That means it will /not/ run when RequestDispatcher.include() is used, for example.

Would this allow the search engine to see the *.vm somehow?

During a forward, the container should set the following request attributes:

javax.servlet.forward.request_uri
javax.servlet.forward.context_path
javax.servlet.forward.servlet_path
javax.servlet.forward.path_info
javax.servlet.forward.query_string





-chris

I'm not sure what you mean by "see the *.vm". Do you mean "can a crawler request the .vm file directly"? That depends on your server configuration. Can /you/ request the .vm directly? If so, then the crawler can, too (although it probably won't, given that it probably doesn't know the paths to any of the templates). I suspect that when RequestDispatcher.forward() is called, the original request is used (plus a ver bits of info -- I'll get to those later) and the same headers are available -- such as the User-Agent. In this case, your User Agent Filter intercepts the request and logs a request for that resource. These attributes contain the original values for each attribute (for instance, /foo forwarding to /bar would have "/foo" as the value for javax.servlet.forward.request_uri). See section 8.4.2 of the servlet specification (and section 8.3.1 for includes) for more details. You should have your filter check to see if those values match the request you /think/ you are processing. I suspect that the User Agent here is not actually requesting those resources... it's a forward or an include that is being handled by your filter as if it were the original request.

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