Servlet redirection but maintain url in browser (make sense?!?)

Question

Hi,
Would like to have a url like www.foo.com/careers
which will call a Servlet, passing in a parameter of "careers" so I know what content to display.
But instead of the url changing to www.foo.com/Servlet?page=careers in the browser (due to obj.con redirect), is there a way I can do this without the url changing from www.foo.com/careers, but still calls the relevant servlet and passes in the correct parameter?
Thanks

Answer 1

We were covering a very similar topic in this thread:
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5194280&tstart=10
Ultimately you would use the If structure with regular expressions to restart the request internally (the user-agent does not see this) with the full URI. Something like:
<If $uri =~ "/(.*)"
and $uri !~ "^/Servlet.*" >
NameTrans fn="restart" uri="/Servlet?page=$1"
</If>
This block appropriately placed in your obj.conf will internally restart the request with the original URI now used as the query string of the new request.
You could also use this instead:
<If not $internal
and $uri =~ "/(.*)" >
This will only perform the restart if the request being processed is determined to NOT be internally generated (e.g. an already restarted request).
Of course you should make sure that you application generates URLs that are appropriate to this URI space, not the canonical URI space. This configuration will also be pretty greedy with your URI space, preferring to rewrite everything:
/foobar/sub/dir/image.jpg
becomes
/Servlet?foobar/sub/dir/image.jpg
So you'll want to refine what options you're willing to match, and restrict the expression used here to be less inclusive.
For more information on this very nifty feature, see the docs at:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-1062/6ncoqnpfh?a=view