Question

Am using a HTML form like this,

<form action="/myservlet?userid=12345" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<input type="file" name="file">
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

And the path of this HTML form is say for example, http://www.mywebapp.com/sample.html

In my servlet when i use the String url = req.getRequestURL().toString(); and printout the string it prints the form action URL http://www.mywebapp.com/myservlet?userid=12345 and not the HTML URL.

The expected HTML URL : http://www.mywebapp.com/sample.html (from here only i request and i need this URL)

Can anyone suggest me how to get the HTML url path in the servlet.

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly you want to get the URL of one request (the request that loaded the html) when you make a subsequent request (the form post).

HTTP is stateless and therefore there is no way to reliably do this.

Needing to do this has a bit of a whiff of a code smell about it, but if you really need the URL you’re going to have to pass the URL as a hidden input in the form. There’s various ways to do this, whether you use JSP/JSTL or do something client side with JavaScript, but basically you trying to get a form like this:

<form action="/myservlet?userid=12345" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
   <input type="file" name="file">
   <input type="hidden" name="url" value="http://www.mywebapp.com/sample.html"/>
   <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>