How to clear the screen output of a Java HttpServletResponse

Question

I'm writing to the browser window using servletResponse.getWriter().write(String).

But how do I clear the text which was written previously by some other similar write call?

Answer 1

You cannot. The best thing is to write to a buffer (StringWriter / StringBuilder) and then you can replace the written data any time. Only when you know for sure what is the response you can write the buffer's content to the response.

In the same matter, and reason to write the response this way and not to use some view technology for your output such as JSP, Velocity, FreeMarker, etc.?

Answer 2

The short answer is, you cannot -- once the browser receives the response, there is no way to take it back. (Unless there is some way to abnormally stop a HTTP response to cause the client to reload the page, or something to that extent.)

Probably the last place a response can be "cleared" in a sense, is using the ServletResponse.reset method, which according to the Servlet Specification, will reset the buffer of the servlet's response.

However, this method also seems to have a catch, as it will only work if the buffer has not been committed (i.e. sent to the client) by the ServletOutputStream's flush method.

Answer 3

If you have an immediate problem that you need to solve quickly, you could work around this design problem by increasing the size of the response buffer - you'll have to read your application server's docs to see if this is possible. However, this solution will not scale as you'll soon run into out-of-memory issues if you site traffic peaks.

No view technology will protect you from this issue. You should design your application to figure out what you're going to show the user before you start writing the response. That means doing all your DB access and business logic ahead of time. This is a common issue I've seen with convoluted system designs that use proxy objects that lazily access the database. E.g. ORM with Entity relationships are bad news if accessed from your view layer! There's not much you can do about an exception that happens 3/4 of the way into a rendered page.

Thinking about it, there might be some way to inject a page redirect via AJAX. Anyone ever heard of a solution like that?

Good luck with re-architecting your design!