Question

our front end guy needs to form a url containing the hash, (i.e, http://blah/#some-link.) when we hit this on the browser and inspect the http traffic using fiddler, we saw that everything after blah/ gets removed, so the request is really just http://blah/. we also confirmed this on our server eclipse debug log.

the request gets redirected to the correct login page by Spring security(because user hasn’t logged in), but the url on the browser now shows:
http://blah/some-link (the hash got removed) but the url on the browser should really be http://blah/log-in.

any idea why this is? any fix or workaround? thanks in advance.

Answer 1

URI part after # is called a fragment:

URI = scheme ":" hier-part [ "?" query ] [ "#" fragment ]

Scheme and hier-part identify the location of a document, and fragment helps the browser to identify a location inside this document.

Fragment is stripped from URI by client software before it is sent as a part of request.

From RFC3986:

the fragment identifier is not used in the scheme-specific
processing of a URI; instead, the fragment identifier is separated
from the rest of the URI prior to a dereference, and thus the
identifying information within the fragment itself is dereferenced
solely by the user agent, regardless of the URI scheme. Although
this separate handling is often perceived to be a loss of
information, particularly for accurate redirection of references as
resources move over time, it also serves to prevent information
providers from denying reference authors the right to refer to
information within a resource selectively.