Basic question about servlet mapping

Question

Hi,

I am new to J2EE and related stuff in general. I am trying to move a particular web application from a Sun One server deployment on to JBoss. The application is filled with a lot of servlets where each one re-directs to another. There are way too many servlets for me to enter a mapping between each of these servlet class to a URL-mapping individually in web.xml. The application code has many redirects where they name the servlet class names itself in the redirect-URL. As of now when I run it on JBoss the redirections to URL with servlet classnames in URL don't seem to work on JBoss (it gives a 404: Not Found, probably since there is no mapping in the web.xml). So is there any config setting that I can set to allow this to happen or should manually enter each and every URLpattern-to-Servlet mapping in the web.xml?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Not sure what you mean by this

the application code has many redirects where they name the servlet class names itself in the redirect-URL

Do you have hardcoded urls in the servlet classes? How many servlets? If you have hardcoded urls they may all have broken because the context is slightly different, or the appname, etc.etc. Can you post an example?

Answer 2

Well, there are some hard-coded URLs in the code, but even if i typed in the right URLs in browser directly I still get a 404. There are about 30 servlets (a conservative approximation). Ex: http://FQDN_SERVER.com/?arg1=ABCD&arg2=XYZ Here the servlet-classname is literally the classname of the servlet without ".class" extension, which may not be a good practice. But the code is full of such redirections and if I have to change this then I have to add a new url-pattern to each of these servlets in the web.xml and construct a new red-rect URL for each of these servlets. So is there anyway I can avoid this or will I have to go through the pain of doing the above mentioned?

Thanks, Manoj

Answer 3

Sorry the URL-pattern looks this http://FQDN_SERVER.com/servlet-classname?arg1=ABCD&arg2=XYZ

Answer 4

There are two solutions.

• As we know JBoss uses Tomcat under the hood as a servlet container. You can enable invoker servlet, that would save you from mapping the whole lot in web.xml. But beware, it will be naive to do that, and not at all encouraged.

• Secondly, you can write another servlet/filter and map just that in your web.xml for every url pattern, may be. Then that new servlet of your can forward the requests to whatever servlet it should.

I hope you get my point.