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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T11:38:25+00:00

I have been searching this topic for quite a while, and haven’t found anything

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I have been searching this topic for quite a while, and haven’t found anything that has been able to solve my problem.. so I turn to you!

I have a JSP where I open a file dialog box to select a file. Previously, I used this to upload the file to a specified directory (in my code). This works fine. I am now trying to use the same code to delete that same file by selecting it in the appropriate directory and passing it off to the servlet, which I included below. I am using the Apache Common FileUpload library to do this.

protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest request,
        HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
    // checks if the request actually contains upload file
    if (!ServletFileUpload.isMultipartContent(request)) {
        // if not, we stop here
        return;
    }

    // configures some settings
    DiskFileItemFactory factory = new DiskFileItemFactory();

    ServletFileUpload delete = new ServletFileUpload(factory);

    // constructs the directory path to delete file
    String deletePath = UPLOAD_DIRECTORY;

    // parses the request's content to extract file data
    List formItems = delete.parseRequest(request);
    Iterator iter = formItems.iterator();

    // iterates over form's fields
    while (iter.hasNext()) {
        FileItem item = (FileItem) iter.next();


        // processes only fields that are not form fields
        if (!item.isFormField()) {


            String fileName = new File(item.getName()).getName();
            String filePath = deletePath + File.separator + fileName;
            File storeFile = new File(filePath);

            //File storeFile = new File("C:\\temp\\discLogo.txt");

            // deletes the file on disk
            boolean erased = storeFile.delete();
            }
        }

UPLOAD_DIRECTORY is where I am storing my files from my upload JSP. The delete method works fine if I uncomment the line I commented out for storeFile with the hardcoded directory, as long as I select a DIFFERENT FILE in the directory initially. This leads me to believe the HttpServletRequest is holding the file in memory somewhere.

Is this correct? is there any way I can release it so I can delete the file I select initially? Or is there a much simpler way to do this?

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Looks like my issue was in my JSP. I had the following form initially:

    <%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>File Delete</title>
</head>
<body>
    <form method="post" action="DeleteServlet"
        enctype="multipart/form-data">
        Select file to delete: <input type="file" name="dataFile"
            id="fileChooser" /><br />
        <br /> <input type="submit" value="Delete" />
    </form>
</body>
</html>

    I changed this by deleting encytype="multipart/form-data" from the form, and was then able to use request.getParameter(“dataFile”) to get the file name.

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