Question

I am trying to implement a simple login servlet but it’s not working properly.

What I wanted to know is how to pass the parameters using a HTTP POST. It already works with HTTP GET but the username and password are visible from the URL. It would be better to hide them in a POST.

<form method="post" action="home" >
  <input name="username" class="form-login" title="Username" value="" size="30" maxlength="2048" />
  <input name="password" type="password" class="form-login" title="Password" value="" size="30" maxlength="2048" />
  <input type="submit" value="Connect">
</form>

web.xml

  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>home</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>controller.HomeController</servlet-class>
  </servlet>

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>home</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/home</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

Servlet:

public class HomeController extends HttpServlet {

    private HttpSession session;
    private UserBean userBean;

    public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
            throws ServletException, IOException {

        UserBean user = new UserBean();
        String userName = request.getParameter("username");
        String password = request.getParameter("password");

        user.setUsername(userName);
        user.setPassword(password);

        user = UserDAO.login(user);

        dispatch(request, response, ApplicationRessource.getInstance().getHomePage());
    }

    protected void dispatch(HttpServletRequest request,
                HttpServletResponse response, String page)
            throws javax.servlet.ServletException, java.io.IOException {
        RequestDispatcher dispatcher = getServletContext()
                .getRequestDispatcher(page);
        dispatcher.forward(request, response);
    }
}

The problem is that the userName and password strings are always empty, meaning that the parameters are never fetched from the POST. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

it should work, can you check by changing form method to get and trying, you should see parameters in url.