How to configure Tomcat to not encode the session id into the URL when HttpServletResponse.encodeURL() is invoked

Question

Seems like a stupid question to which the answer would be "Don't use encodeURL()!" but I'm working with a codebase that uses netui anchor tags in the JSPs and I need to disable the writing of JSESSIONID into the URLs as it is a security risk.

In WebLogic, you can configure this by configuring url-rewriting-enabled in weblogic.xml (I know because I wrote that feature in the WebLogic server!). However, I can't find an equivalent config option for Tomcat.

Answer 1

Tomcat 6 supports the disableURLRewriting attribute that can be set to true in your Context element:

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/context.html#Common_Attributes

Answer 2

No setting comes to mind. But this is fairly easy to do by creating a first-entry Filter listening on the url-pattern of interest (maybe /* ?) and replaces the ServletResponse by a HttpServletResponseWrapper implementation where the encodeURL() returns the very same argument unmodified back.

Kickoff example:

public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
    chain.doFilter(request, new HttpServletResponseWrapper((HttpServletResponse) response) {
        public String encodeURL(String url) {
            return url;
        }
    });
}