Clarification of Servlet Spec for forwarding and filters

Question

Hi everybody,
I'm having a problem trying to use SiteMesh in WebLogic 9.1 vs Tomcat 5.5.17. The issue seems to come up because the two containers have different behavior when it comes to forwarding and filters.
The scenario is this: A request comes in to a servlet, that servlet forwards to a JSP page using RequestDispatcher.forward(). The SiteMesh filter looks at request.getServletPath() after the chain has executed and determines whether or not to apply the decoration based on the path of the page. The filter's doFilter() method looks something like :
chain.doFilter(request, response)
if(request.getServletPath() = matchingPath)
    applyDecoration();
}Now, in Tomcat, a call to request.getServletPath() before and after the call to chain.doFilter() returns the exact same thing, regardless of whether the target servlet executes a forward. But in WebLogic, the call to getServletPath() after chain.doFilter() returns the forwarded path, not the original path.
Who is right? Or is this one of those gray areas?
Thanks,
Scott

Answer 1

Thanks for the info. You are correct, I was using 'forward'. I changed it to use 'sendRedirect' and this time the request goes via the filter. However, the request parameters that were in the original request have disappeared after the 'sendRedirect'. I could just add all the request parameters to the string I pass to sendredirect but was wondering if there was a better/simpler way.
Thanks,
Paul