Possible to redirect JSP output?

Question

Is it possible to redirect the output of a JSP either directly to a printer or directly to a File object? I would like to write a report template using JSP and be able to display it via a browser (so far so good, that's what JSP does) but I'd also like to take the same output that the JSP generates and either print it directly (as in printing many many reports without having to run each one in a browser and click the browser print button) AND to be able to email the report to a client.
Each of these means I need to redirect the output of a JSP. I couldn't find anything in this forum about that. Is this even possible?
Thank you in advance for your answers.

Answer 1

The problem with using a new URLConnection is that the current session is not applied to the JSP page as desired.
For those using Tomcat 4, which implements the Servlet 2.3 spec, this page describes how to replace the output stream of a servlet with your own.
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-tomcat/
The example implements a character replacement mechanism. Using a filter and a wrapper. I modified this example to redirect the output stream to a file, which allowed me to then e-mail the output of a JSP. I did this by only using the wrapper classes.
Here are the relavant excerpts from my code
//Inside the servlet:
//{snip}...
String sFileName = "e:\\temp\\email\\temp.html";
RedirectTextWrapper rTW =
new RedirectTextWrapper(response, sFileName);
gotoPage(sAddress, request, rTW);
//{snip}...
//Supporting classes:
class RedirectTextStream
extends ServletOutputStream {
private OutputStream intStream;
private boolean closed = false;
public RedirectTextStream(String sFileName) {
try{
intStream = new FileOutputStream(sFileName);
}catch(FileNotFoundException e){
e.printStackTrace();
public void write(int i)
throws java.io.IOException {
intStream.write(i);
public void close()
throws java.io.IOException {
if (!closed) {
intStream.close();
closed = true;
public void flush() throws java.io.IOException {
intStream.flush();
class RedirectTextWrapper
extends HttpServletResponseWrapper {
private PrintWriter tpWriter;
private RedirectTextStream tpStream;
public RedirectTextWrapper(ServletResponse inResp,
String sFileName)
throws java.io.IOException {
super((HttpServletResponse) inResp);
tpStream = new RedirectTextStream(sFileName);
tpWriter = new PrintWriter(tpStream);
public ServletOutputStream getOutputStream()
throws java.io.IOException {
return tpStream;
public PrintWriter getWriter()
throws java.io.IOException {
return tpWriter;
}