newbie form submit question

[Mark Kelsall]

hi guys,

i appreciate that this is probably going to be a very straight forward answer or point in the right direction but i'm struggling to find the right words to search in google.

I want a form & i want to submit to my controller serviet (straight forward enough) but the complication is that my form is in a folder & obviously the servlet is at the application root. Let me give you an example:

folder structure:
root:
web-inf/
meta-inf/
css/
register/
register.jsp

i have a form on the register.jsp & i want to submit it to my servlet which obviously lives at the root. What do I need to put in the action of the form to get it to submit to the root?

Thanks in advance

Mark

[Paul Clapham]

Your servlet can't be at the root of your application's folder tree. It has to be in the /WEB-INF/classes folder. That's WEB-INF, not web-inf by the way. And it has to be in a directory structure which matches its package declaration as well. And finally you'll need a servlet mapping in your web.xml deployment description which maps the URL you plan to use to the servlet.

[Stefan Evans]

The obvious (and incorrect) answer would be <form action="/myServlet">

The gotcha here of course being that you need to allow for the web context that you are in.

So the answer becomes:
<form action="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/myServlet">

And of course there has to be a mapping for "/myServlet" in your web.xml file.

This is one thing I like about using a framework, is that they will abstract away annoying stuff like this, and just let you specify a web application relative path to your form handler.

[Mark Kelsall]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your reply. Yeah I understand that it actually isn't at the root of the application folder tree & i only typed it like that just because I was being lazy :P I've got it all set up architecturally OK & working, I was just lacking this missing piece, which Stefan has been able to help with!

Stefan, that's brilliant, I never knew about that! Yeah I know that a framework is the way forward, but i'm still learning so I want to understand all the intricate bits "under the hood", i'm a geek like that, but aren't we all!

Edit: I have tried the code now but it unfortunately doesn't work out of the box. If for example my controller servlet is defined as follows

<servlet> <servlet-name>ControllerServlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>com.packageName.ui.web.ControllerServlet</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>ControllerServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>cs</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping>

in my web.xml. How would I be able to submit to that from a jsp page in the root WebContent folder & also one in register which is a sub-folder of WebContent???

Thanks

[Stefan Evans]

I think the only thing you are missing is a / character in your servlet mapping:

      <servlet-name>ControllerServlet</servlet-name>  
         <url-pattern>/cs</url-pattern>  
     </servlet-mapping>  

And then the following form tag should work from whichever jsp you submit from:

<form action="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/cs"> 

[Mark Kelsall]

Again you're right Stefan! I revisited it & stepped through it with a bit more patience instead of wanting it to work out of the box (like you always do when you get so frustrated that you post it on a forum).

Anyway thanks for your help, much appreciated :)

Mark