Documenting HttpServletRequest

David — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:27:29 +0000

For such a core object the HttpServletRequest javadoc is a little lacking in the Examples Dept. when it comes to documented output. With various methods returning various parts of URLs, it’s often easy to pick the wrong one, so I thought I’d knock up a little table with the getters which trip me up sometimes.

This assumes a simple webapp, living on a server on the local machine, sitting under the context called ‘context’, responding to the URL:

http://localhost:8080/context/hello/world?foo=bar

Method	Response	Notes
getContextPath()	/context	The context part of the URL. Should be obvious.
getPathInfo()	/hello/world	The part of the URL after the context, but not including the query string.
getPathTranslated()	/Users/david/projects/java/hello-world-webapp/target/context/hello/world	Hrm. Sort of where this would be on the local filesystem, but not really.
getProtocol()	HTTP/1.1	This doesn’t produce anything verbatum from the URL, such as ‘http’ or ‘https’ or ‘ftp’ or…
getQueryString()	foo=bar	Like it says, the query string.
getRequestURI()	/context/hello/world	Everything from but not including the port, up to but not including the query string.
getRequestURL()	http://localhost:8080/context/hello/world	This is a StringBuffer object, containing everything but the query string.
getServerName()	localhost	The server name as presented in the URL, not the hostname of the box.
getServerPort()	8080	As expected. Good, good.
getServletPath()		This is the path that the servlet is configured (e.g. in web.xml) to respond to relative to the context. It’ll be an empty-string if, as here, this is in response to a wildcard mapping “/*”.

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Documenting HttpServletRequest