Login and goto fails

Question

Hi,
I need to call a servlet directly without getting authenticated. The reason I need the session is because I'm using profile APIs. The method I'm trying out is using login and goto. In the user servlets, I get a session exception ( Invalid Service Host Name ) which I catch and in the catch block I use login and goto to get the session cookie and redirect to the user servlet.
try{
//Get session and profile here
catch{
redirectURL = "login?&goto=" + req.getRequestURI();
resp.sendRedirect(redirectURL);
This works if the servlet is called from a direct HREF link. If this servlet is posted from a form, it works at times but is very inconsistent. We get a BAD REQUEST on the browser when it fails.
Any ideas why this happens ?
Thanks

Answer 1

Thanks for the suggestions ! The original problem of not being able to pass parameters like -
"login?&goto=" + req.getRequestURI + "?param=" + value"
has been solved by encoding the URL string sent to resp.sendRedirect.
However the suggestion you have given regarding setting of cookies in the browser might have a bearing on my actual problem. I'm trying to do away with the redirection to the login servlet in the DesktopServlet.
Here is what I'm trying to do to make our website searchengine friendly - using WGET scrape the DesktopServlet and set it as the index.html. When somebody tries to access the links which are ordinary servlets, it gives a session exception. I catch the session exception and in the catch block use "login?&goto" to do a response.sendRedirect. This does a login and gets me the session.
All the servlets work fine except for one which is identical to the ones working except for the fact it is a post from a form on the DesktopServlet. Here I get a HTTP 400 Bad Request error. I've noticed that when I clear the cache and try I get a better response.
Any suggestion on how to overcome this ( possibly by setting cookies ) would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance