Filter mapping url-pattern that excludes subdirectories

Question

Is there any way to make a filtermapping not include subdirectories?

For example.

I have .xhtml files in my context root, and I also have a subfolder named "test" with files with the same extension. Is there any may to map a filter to the files in context root and not to the files in the "test" directory?

Answer 1

Some containers (like resin) define an extension to filter mapping definition in web.xml which allows specifying url-regexp which allows matching the urls based on regular expression. (reference). See if your container has something like this.

Answer 2

Using what is available for standard servlets/filters, there is no direct way to exclude the subdirectory, since *.ext style mappings include subdirectories. You could work around this by declaring another filter that specifically handles the /test/*.xhtml mapping and handles that accordingly.

Answer 3

The url-pattern is indeed restrictive in matching. It only allows exact, prefix or suffix matchnig. Not midst/overall/regex matching. So e.g. /*.xhtml what you intend to do ain't going to work.

If you want to exclude XHTML in the /test folder only, then your best is really a Filter listening on an url-pattern of *.xhtml which does basically the following job in doFilter() method:

// First cast ServletRequest to HttpServletRequest.
HttpServletRequest hsr = (HttpServletRequest) request;

// Check if requested resource is not in /test folder.
if (!hsr.getServletPath().startsWith("/test/")) {
    // Not in /test folder. Do your thing here.
}

The HttpServletRequest#getServletPath() basically returns the part of the request URI from the context path on.

You can if necessary configure the value /test as an <init-param> of the filter so that you can control the value from inside the web.xml instead of in the Filter's code.