Capture JSP output, save to file

Question

I'm tasked with trying creating a site which will create custom HTML templates. The customizations are based-up customized upon user input. I'm currently using tomcat / JSP for the rest of the front end. What I want to do is create the HTML templates in JSP to output conditional HTML code, but instead of display this HTML output to the user, I'd like to save this code to several files (which will then be zipped up and delivered to the user, along with images, css files, js files). I need to know how to create a fake container that will execute a JSP file (process includes and evaluate variables).

I read about using server filters to intercept the output of JSP code, but I am not sure this will work because a) I need to create several HTML files and b) I need to display different content to the user ( i.e. here's ur zip file, download it) not the output of the JSP being processed.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here is an idea. Create a servlet to accept the input from the user, from the servlet use java.net.HttpURLConnection to pass the input to the JSP page and to get the result.

URL urlPage = new URL(url);
HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection)urlPage.openConnection();
conn.connect();
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));

//then loop through lines of webpage with br.readLine();

Then in your servlet you can zip all the files you pull and return it to the user