RequestDispatcher forward method not working

[Ravi Kiran Va]

Hi , i have written a simple servlet for forwarding to a page (www.google.com ) , but its not working , can anybody please tell whats the problem is :

public class Aa extends HttpServlet {
    protected void processRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
            throws ServletException, IOException {
        response.setContentType("text/html;charset=UTF-8");
        PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
        try {
            RequestDispatcher dispatcher = getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher("https://www.google.co.in");
            dispatcher.forward(request, response);
        }

On the execution of above the browser displays :

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Path https://www.google.co.in does not start with a "/" character

After appending with /

 RequestDispatcher dispatcher = getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher("/https://www.google.co.in");

The browser shows a 404 error .

please tell whats the problem is .

[Rakesh Jhamb]

Please read the API documentation which says that....


public RequestDispatcher getRequestDispatcher(java.lang.String path)


The pathname must begin with a "/" and is interpreted as relative to the current context root.

Use getContext to obtain a RequestDispatcher for resources in foreign contexts. This method returns null if the ServletContext cannot return a RequestDispatcher.

I hope it helps.

[Ravi Kiran Va]

Thanks Rakesh , anyways my question remains the same.

[Devaka Cooray]

Ravi,

RequestDispatcher cannot be used to redirect to external web sites. If you need to redirect to an external web site like http://www.google.com you have to use response.sendRedirect method instead.

response.sendRedirect("http://www.gooogle.com");

Cheers,

Devaka.

[Ravi Kiran Va]

Thank you very much Devaka