Question

I’m developing web application on spring where authentication is made with Spring Security 3 and LDAP.

This is a form-login snippet from my code:

<security:form-login
    authentication-failure-url="/index.xhtml?error=true"
    default-target-url="/SomeDefaultUrl.xhtml"
    login-page="/index.xhtml" />

When authentication fails my application is redirected to “/index.xhtml?error=true” url. The problem is that I don’t know how to catch “error” variable and show some authentication failure message in index.xhtml file. I’m not using Spring mvc.

The second problem is that changing of authentication-failure-url doesn’t work.

<security:form-login
    authentication-failure-url="/error.xhtml"
    default-target-url="/SomeDefaultUrl.xhtml"
    login-page="/index.xhtml" />

I changed authentication-failure-url, but despite of this change, it still redirects to index.xhtml file without any variables.

How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

Important: /index.xhtml?error=true sends error as GET parameter.

If your index.xhtml is a JSP file you can access that param using implicit request reference:

<%= request.getParameter("error") %>

If index.xhtml is URL of your web controller method/servlet you need to get error param from Request object.

public void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res) throws ServletException, IOException 
{       
    String error = req.getParameter("error");
}

Finally, if your index.xhtml is a plain html file, you can use Java Script to get that parameter:
How to retrieve GET parameters from javascript?

For your second question: make sure you properly rebuild your project. It looks like it didn’t notice your changes.