Is it possible to use UrlRewriter outside servlet and filter in Java?

Question

I have set up UrlRewriterFilter (Tuckey) with many rules and it is working very good for my servlet. But I want to use the same config to rewrite urls outside servlet - in code that generates e-mails with urls.

So, I need to somehow start UrlRewriter (or some kind of wrapper) to process outgoing url i.e. rewrite them with my outbound-rules already defined in config (urlrewrite.xml).

I would like to use it just like this:

String prettyUrl = urlRewriter.rewriteOutgoingUrl(uglyUrl);

Is this possible at all? How to achieve this goal?

Answer 1

You probably just need to initialize UrlRewriteFilter. Since you have to add this in your web.xml file normally the UrlRewriteFilter config files probably get loaded once. I would try loading this in a static initializer in some wrapper class you define. To define a static initializer all you need to do is within a class have the following:

static { //Your initialization code goes here }

This code will only be initialized once, during runtime. For more information please look here: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/javaOO/initial.html

Answer 2

It's open source. You could review it's source code (http://code.google.com/p/urlrewritefilter/source/browse/trunk/src/java/org/tuckey/web/filters/urlrewrite/UrlRewriteFilter.java) and see if the logic is available in standalone class(es) which don't rely on servlet request/response objects. If it is, just use it. Otherwise you can build it yourself based on the original source, reusing as much of the library as possible.