Giving multiple URL patterns to Servlet Filter

Question

I am using a Servlet Filter in my JSF application. I have three groups of Web pages in my application, and I want to check Authentication for these pages in my Servlet Filter:

my Folders

/Admin/ *.xhtml  /Supervisor/*.xhtml /Employee/*.xhtml 

and I am writing web.xml like

<filter>     <filter-name>LoginFilter</filter-name>     <filter-class>com.ems.admin.servlet.LoginFilter</filter-class> </filter>  <filter-mapping>     <filter-name>LoginFilter</filter-name>     <url-pattern>/Employee/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> <filter-mapping>     <filter-name>LoginFilter</filter-name>     <url-pattern>/Admin/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> <filter-mapping>     <filter-name>LoginFilter</filter-name>     <url-pattern>/Supervisor/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> 

but requests like

http://localhost:8080/EMS2/faces/Html/Admin/Upload.xhtml 

are not entering into Filter.

I have to provide security to these 3 folders.

How to solve this problem ?

Answer 1

If an URL pattern starts with /, then it's relative to the context root. The /Admin/* URL pattern would only match pages on http://localhost:8080/EMS2/Admin/* (assuming that /EMS2 is the context path), but you have them actually on http://localhost:8080/EMS2/faces/Html/Admin/*, so your URL pattern never matches.

You need to prefix your URL patterns with /faces/Html as well like so:

<url-pattern>/faces/Html/Admin/*</url-pattern> 

You can alternatively also just reconfigure your web project structure/configuration so that you can get rid of the /faces/Html path in the URLs so that you can just open the page by for example http://localhost:8080/EMS2/Admin/Upload.xhtml.

Your filter mapping syntax is all fine. However, a simpler way to specify multiple URL patterns is to just use only one <filter-mapping> with multiple <url-pattern> entries:

<filter-mapping>     <filter-name>LoginFilter</filter-name>     <url-pattern>/faces/Html/Employee/*</url-pattern>     <url-pattern>/faces/Html/Admin/*</url-pattern>     <url-pattern>/faces/Html/Supervisor/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> 

Answer 2

In case you are using the annotation method for filter definition (as opposed to defining them in the web.xml), you can do so by just putting an array of mappings in the @WebFilter annotation:

/**  * Filter implementation class LoginFilter  */ @WebFilter(urlPatterns = { "/faces/Html/Employee","/faces/Html/Admin", "/faces/Html/Supervisor"}) public class LoginFilter implements Filter {     ... 

And just as an FYI, this same thing works for servlets using the servlet annotation too:

/**  * Servlet implementation class LoginServlet  */ @WebServlet({"/faces/Html/Employee", "/faces/Html/Admin", "/faces/Html/Supervisor"}) public class LoginServlet extends HttpServlet {     ...