Filtering Requests and Responses

A filter is an object that can transform the header and content (or both) of a request or response. Filters differ from web components in that filters usually do not themselves create a response. Instead, a filter provides functionality that can be "attached" to any kind of web resource. Consequently, a filter should not have any dependencies on a web resource for which it is acting as a filter; this way it can be composed with more than one type of web resource. The main tasks that a filter can perform are as follows:

Applications of filters include authentication, logging, image conversion, data compression, encryption, tokenizing streams, XML transformations, and so on.

You can configure a web resource to be filtered by a chain of zero, one, or more filters in a specific order. This chain is specified when the web application containing the component is deployed and is instantiated when a web container loads the component.

In summary, the tasks involved in using filters are

Programming Filters

The filtering API is defined by the Filter, FilterChain, and FilterConfig interfaces in the javax.servlet package. You define a filter by implementing the Filter interface. The most important method in this interface is doFilter, which is passed request, response, and filter chain objects. This method can perform the following actions:

In addition to doFilter, you must implement the init and destroy methods. The init method is called by the container when the filter is instantiated. If you wish to pass initialization parameters to the filter, you retrieve them from the FilterConfig object passed to init.

The Duke's Bookstore application uses the filters HitCounterFilter and OrderFilter to increment and log the value of counters when the entry and receipt servlets are accessed.

In the doFilter method, both filters retrieve the servlet context from the filter configuration object so that they can access the counters stored as context attributes. After the filters have completed application-specific processing, they invoke doFilter on the filter chain object passed into the original doFilter method. The elided code is discussed in the next section. 

public final class HitCounterFilter implements Filter {
  private FilterConfig filterConfig = null;

  public void init(FilterConfig filterConfig) 
    throws ServletException {
    this.filterConfig = filterConfig;
  }
  public void destroy() {
    this.filterConfig = null;
  }
  public void doFilter(ServletRequest request,
    ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) 
    throws IOException, ServletException {
    if (filterConfig == null)
      return;
    StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
    PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(sw);
    Counter counter = (Counter)filterConfig.
      getServletContext().
      getAttribute("hitCounter");
    writer.println();
    writer.println("===============");
    writer.println("The number of hits is: " +
      counter.incCounter());
    writer.println("===============");
    // Log the resulting string
    writer.flush();
    System.out.println(sw.getBuffer().toString());
    ...
    chain.doFilter(request, wrapper);
    ...
  }
}

Programming Customized Requests and Responses

There are many ways for a filter to modify a request or response. For example, a filter can add an attribute to the request or can insert data in the response. In the Duke's Bookstore example, HitCounterFilter inserts the value of the counter into the response.

A filter that modifies a response must usually capture the response before it is returned to the client. To do this, you pass a stand-in stream to the servlet that generates the response. The stand-in stream prevents the servlet from closing the original response stream when it completes and allows the filter to modify the servlet's response.

To pass this stand-in stream to the servlet, the filter creates a response wrapper that overrides the getWriter or getOutputStream method to return this stand-in stream. The wrapper is passed to the doFilter method of the filter chain. Wrapper methods default to calling through to the wrapped request or response object. This approach follows the well-known Wrapper or Decorator pattern described in Design Patterns, Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, by Erich Gamma et al. (Addison-Wesley, 1995). The following sections describe how the hit counter filter described earlier and other types of filters use wrappers.

To override request methods, you wrap the request in an object that extends ServletRequestWrapper or HttpServletRequestWrapper. To override response methods, you wrap the response in an object that extends ServletResponseWrapper or HttpServletResponseWrapper.

HitCounterFilter wraps the response in a CharResponseWrapper. The wrapped response is passed to the next object in the filter chain, which is BookStoreServlet. Then BookStoreServlet writes its response into the stream created by CharResponseWrapper. When chain.doFilter returns, HitCounterFilter retrieves the servlet's response from PrintWriter and writes it to a buffer. The filter inserts the value of the counter into the buffer, resets the content length header of the response, and then writes the contents of the buffer to the response stream. 

PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
CharResponseWrapper wrapper = new CharResponseWrapper(
  (HttpServletResponse)response);
chain.doFilter(request, wrapper);
CharArrayWriter caw = new CharArrayWriter();
caw.write(wrapper.toString().substring(0,
  wrapper.toString().indexOf("</body>")-1));
caw.write("<p>\n<center>" + 
  messages.getString("Visitor") + "<font color='red'>" + 
  counter.getCounter() + "</font></center>");
caw.write("\n</body></html>");
response.setContentLength(caw.toString().getBytes().length);
out.write(caw.toString());
out.close();

public class CharResponseWrapper extends
  HttpServletResponseWrapper {
  private CharArrayWriter output;
  public String toString() {
    return output.toString();
  }
  public CharResponseWrapper(HttpServletResponse response){
    super(response);
    output = new CharArrayWriter();
  }
  public PrintWriter getWriter(){
    return new PrintWriter(output);
  }
}

Figure 11-3 shows the entry page for Duke's Bookstore with the hit counter.

Duke's Bookstore

Figure 11-3 Duke's Bookstore with Hit Counter

Specifying Filter Mappings

A web container uses filter mappings to decide how to apply filters to web resources. A filter mapping matches a filter to a web component by name, or to web resources by URL pattern. The filters are invoked in the order in which filter mappings appear in the filter mapping list of a WAR. You specify a filter mapping list for a WAR by using deploytool or by coding the list directly in the web application deployment descriptor as follows:

  1. Declare the filter. This element creates a name for the filter and declares the filter's implementation class and initialization parameters.
  2. Map the filter to a web resource by name or by URL pattern.
  3. Constrain how the filter will be applied to requests by choosing one of the enumerated dispatcher options:
    • REQUEST: Only when the request comes directly from the client
    • FORWARD: Only when the request has been forwarded to a component (see Transferring Control to Another Web Component)
    • INCLUDE: Only when the request is being processed by a component that has been included (see Including Other Resources in the Response)
    • ERROR: Only when the request is being processed with the error page mechanism (see Handling Errors)

      • You can direct the filter to be applied to any combination of the preceding situations by including multiple dispatcher elements. If no elements are specified, the default option is REQUEST.

If you want to log every request to a web application, you map the hit counter filter to the URL pattern /*. Step 8. in The Example Servlets shows how to create and map the filters for the Duke's Bookstore application. Table 11-7 summarizes the filter definition and mapping list for the Duke's Bookstore application. The filters are matched by servlet name, and each filter chain contains only one filter.

Table 11-7 Duke's Bookstore Filter Definition and Mapping List 
Filter
Class
Servlet
HitCounterFilter
filters.HitCounterFilter
BookStoreServlet
OrderFilter
filters.OrderFilter
ReceiptServlet

You can map a filter to one or more web resources and you can map more than one filter to a web resource. This is illustrated in Figure 11-4, where filter F1 is mapped to servlets S1, S2, and S3, filter F2 is mapped to servlet S2, and filter F3 is mapped to servlets S1 and S2.

Filter to Servlet Mapping

Figure 11-4 Filter-to-Servlet Mapping

Recall that a filter chain is one of the objects passed to the doFilter method of a filter. This chain is formed indirectly via filter mappings. The order of the filters in the chain is the same as the order in which filter mappings appear in the web application deployment descriptor.

When a filter is mapped to servlet S1, the web container invokes the doFilter method of F1. The doFilter method of each filter in S1's filter chain is invoked by the preceding filter in the chain via the chain.doFilter method. Because S1's filter chain contains filters F1 and F3, F1's call to chain.doFilter invokes the doFilter method of filter F3. When F3's doFilter method completes, control returns to F1's doFilter method.