Trouble getting data that I post to my JSC web application

Question

I have some Java code that posts an XML document to my web application. I tried placing the following code in the init() method of my first page.
FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
String postData = context.getExternalContext().getRequest().toString();
Instead of getting the XML content that I posted, I get this result in the string :
com.sun.faces.context.MyHttpServletRequestWrapper@1c26895
I wish I knew more about the architecture, and exactly what happens when a request is sent to the application URL with post data.
Joe Paladin

Answer 1

FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
String postData = context.getExternalContext().getRequest().toString();
Instead of getting the XML content that I posted, I get this result in the string :
com.sun.faces.context.MyHttpServletRequestWrapper@1c26895Right - the request object you got is HttPServletRequest implementation, see for example :
http://java.sun.com/javaee/javaserverfaces/1.0/docs/api/javax/faces/context/ExternalContext.html#getRequest()
Now you can cast to and use various methods of HttPServletRequest to access the data submitted to the servlet. See for example getInputStream or getParameterValues methods:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-4.1-doc/servletapi/javax/servlet/ServletRequest.html#getInputStream()
I wish I knew more about the architecture, and exactly what happens when a request is sent to the application URL with post data.It is HTTP POST request (google for rfc2068) : on the wire it is a stream with set of headers, including such as length of the data being submitted and its encoding, followed by the data encoded in either one of 2 ways, please see http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.13 and
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4
In particular the content of the submitted file should be streamed as part of "multipart/form-data" encoded data stream.