Question

Does servlet support urls as follows:

/xyz/{value}/test

where value could be replaced by text or number.

How to map that in the web.xml?

Answer 1

Your best bet is the URL pattern /xyz/*.

The Servlet API doesn’t support to have the URL pattern wildcard * in the middle of the mapping such as /xyz/*/test nor URI templates. It only allows the wildcard * in the end of the mapping like so /prefix/* or in the start of the mapping like so *.suffix.

You can extract the path information using HttpServletRequest#getPathInfo(). Here’s a basic kickoff example how to extract the path information, null and array index out of bounds checks omitted for brevity:

@WebServlet("/xyz/*")
public class XyzServlet extends HttpServlet {

    @Override
    protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) throws ServletException, IOException {
        String pathInfo = request.getPathInfo(); // /{value}/test
        String[] pathParts = pathInfo.split("/");
        String value = pathParts[1]; // {value}
        String action = pathParts[2]; // test
        
        if ("test".equals(action)) {
            // ...
        }
    }
}

If you want to be able to use URI templates nonetheless, and this is actually intended to be a REST endpoint rather than a HTML page, then take a look at Jakarta REST (JAX-RS):

@Path("/xyz/{value}/test")
public class XyzResource {

    @GET
    @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public String getTest(@PathParam("value") String value) {
        // ...
    }
}

If you want more finer grained control liks as possible with Apache HTTPD’s mod_rewrite, then you could look at Tuckey’s URL rewrite filter or homegrow your own URL rewrite filter.